David Shapshak
Products: HP PhotoSmart 1100 printer (R3 559), C200 digital camera (R2 875), and ScanJet 6300C scanner (R3 029); photo- quality paper – R60 for 20 sheets
Digital cameras are one of those next big things that have initially failed to become the next big thing. They’ve suffered from being too pricey, and from the laborious printing process via PC.
This is changing. In Europe, whose market trends South Africa follows most closely, the digital camera has left the early adopter stage for that of the mass market, says research company International Data Corporation.
Falling prices and better quality and resolution are attracting the average consumer, with sales expected to reach 616 000 units this year and four million by 2003. That’s a market growing from $321- million to $981-million.
But one of the major obstacles to the popular, and widespread, uptake of digital photography remains the obvious complications involved in printing. Most consumers still want quick and simple postcard prints.
This has now been provided by consumer giant Hewlett-Packard (HP) with some finesse in its latest range of printers, the PhotoSmart 1100.
Most of the new crop of digital cameras, such as the HP C500 or C200, use flash cards, a new form of standardised memory that fits on cards smaller than a stiffy disc.
HP has brought out a new range of printers which allow you to print directly from the camera to the printer.
Just take the flash card out and plug it straight into the new PhotoSmart printer. The printer allows you to print an index sheet of thumbnails on photographic paper and choose which pictures you’d like to print at what size.
Of course, you can still load pictures into your computer when you want to edit or store them, or send them as e-mail attachments.
HP’s re-engineered printing process cuts out your various trips to and from the film shop when you get back from holiday: dropping off, collecting, moaning about the quality and going back for enlargement and reprints.
If you want to manipulate your images on your PC – change the background, add roses or wipe away a skin blemish – HP offers an excellent software package, PhotoSuite Se II.
All this is part of HP’s new strategy for consumer photography, which they call “digital imaging”.
People want to capture their images – be they photographs, graphics or other images – digitally, send them by e-mail and, perhaps most importantly, store them. Photo albums can burn, get lost, be water damaged.
For those without digital cameras there’s a range of new scanners that feature one- button push and scan functionality. The ScanJet 6300C series will not only input your images, but scan text and digitise that too.
But will this digital revolution, as HP envisions it, take off? Ease of use may be one thing, but most consumers are as interested in price as they are in simplicity.
Fortunately, scanner and digital camera prices will continue to drop, says Russ Radom, HP’s general manager for personal imaging and printing in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. This digital capture market, he says, will carry on growing by 70% to 100% more units this year.
Storing the images is the next aspect of the digital imaging path. While CD-writers have been popular for quite a while, the next generation of these storage devices is the rewritable. In the past a blank CD could only be recorded on once. Now new software makes it possible to “write”, or store data to it, over and over again – like writing information to a hard drive. Not too far down the line, you’ll be able to fit a lifetime’s worth of photographs on to a rewritable DVD-ROM, and slip it into your handbag for visits to the grandchildren.