Digital seen as photo world’s future

Kevin Rademacher

Friday, Feb. 13, 2004 | 11:01 a.m.

Technology is changing Mike Gordon's life.

Photography has been his life for years, but recently he said he feels more like a technology consultant than manager of a photography shop.

"I'm a photographer from way back, but I'm being forced into the computer age," said Gordon, who manages Wolf Camera, 675 Mall Ring Circle, in Henderson.

From the comments during a panel discussion of industry heavyweights at the Photo Marketing Association convention in Las Vegas this week, Gordon and his industry colleagues have little choice.

"With digital printing, we have great options for the industry," Norio Niwa, executive vice president of Seiko Epson Corp., told a meeting room full of photography retailers.

To take advantage of those options, however, retailers must be ready to adapt.

"Retailers have to understand and embrace these technologies," Niwa said.

As digital cameras and the opportunity for printing higher quality photos on home computer equipment have expanded, retailers have seen a softening demand for film and photo processing. U.S. film sales are declining at a rate of 10-12 percent a year, said Daniel Carp, chief executive of Eastman Kodak Co.

While that number is a concern for retailers, the digital wave has created new opportunities. Carp and other panelists agreed that the advent of digital cameras -- and the more recent boom in camera phones -- mean more photos are being taken today than ever before.

"There's a zillion new images out there," Carp said, adding that recent research shows that of the digital images taken, only about one-third are being printed. "We need the retailers to get people to print those images."

Gordon agreed.

"Where we used to see people come in with two, three rolls of film -- if you do the math that's about 75 images -- now when someone comes in with a media card you're talking about 200 or 300 images," he said.

Gordon cautioned that the down side is that customers now pick and choose which images they want printed.

Companies like Kodak and Fuji Photo Film Co. are scrambling to get equipment such as self-operated kiosks and larger photo processing machines into retail shops in hope of enticing customers to take advantage of the superior quality of retail processing.

Gordon said his shop received its Fuji processing equipment in May 2003, after a year-and-a-half wait because of an industry-wide backlog.

"We're getting more and more people coming in to have prints made," he said.

That could be following a trend first seen in Japan. Shigetaka Komori, chief executive for Fuji, said that consumers in that county are a few years ahead of the U.S. market in digital photography.

"In Japan, home printing used to be very popular," he said through an interpreter. "They are coming back to retail for its advantages."

Vyomesh Joshi, executive vice president for Hewlett-Packard, said 80 percent of the photos printed in the United States are being printed at home. He said it is unlikely that the home-printing industry will relinquish any marketshare anytime soon.

"(Consumers) are looking for a choice and convenience," Joshi said, discounting the knocks on home-printing quality dished out by Kodak and Fuji. "You can get tremendous quality on a five-megapixel camera right in you own home. We need to focus on making it fast and easy."

Carp and Joshi also agreed that image management also will be a new opportunity for the photo companies. They pointed to efforts to create better Internet-based image storage systems. Carp added that Kodak is working to develop partnerships that would allow those cyberspace-based images to be downloaded into retail shops ready for printing.

That effort becomes more important as camera-phones continue to grow in demand. The panel of experts pointed out that the vast majority of photos taken via cell phone are never printed.

"It's the next frontier," Carp said. "(Camera phones) are what we've all dreamed of in this industry, everyone having a camera with them all the time. It's going to create a tremendous amount of new images. We need the retailer to help us get those images printed."