Can Fotobar Make Polaroid Relevant Again? 149
The years have not been kind to Polaroid. The company has gone through a couple of bankruptcies, and has tried to reinvent itself with a number of less-than-popular products including: an Android powered "smart camera," and a digital camera that incorporates instant printing. They hope to reverse their fortunes now by partnering with a startup called Fotobar and plan "to open a chain of retail stores where customers can come in and print out their favorite pictures from their mobile phones." The first is scheduled to open in February in Delray Beach, Florida, and the goal is to open 10 locations across the country before the year is out."
No. (Score:2, Informative)
check subject.
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Betterage's law is complete and utter bullshit (he broke his own law himself), but in this case it does apply -- Polaroid is history.
Huh, who'd have thought of that? (Score:1)
Oh yeah, Walmart...
Re:Huh, who'd have thought of that? (Score:5, Funny)
Fuck walmart.
Re:Huh, who'd have thought of that? (Score:5, Funny)
I sincerely hope you poker faced it and tried to convince the clerk that's just how family reunions roll after a couple beers...
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Not even just Walmart. Every mass merchandiser big box store has a "photolab" as well as every drug store. And since CVS, Walgreens, et al have a location on every corner in just about every city, you're never about 30 seconds away from one in any decent sized town.
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Re:Huh, who'd have thought of that? (Score:4, Informative)
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That is fine for photos in your phone...
...which brings us back to the subject we're discussing, at least if you've read the article/summary.
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So yeah they have a shot if it has actual customer service and decent prices, I know plenty of people that would love to have better than inkjet prints of their family photos but like me have gotten turned off by the attitude of the only 2 in town, so why not? After all its not like its gonna make the company worse off than they already are.
I don't think prints from walgreens or walmart (both of which I have used) are any better than the inkjet prints you can do at home with any reasonable (~$200) printer and quality photo paper. The only thing that typical home printers lack are the ability to print very large poster size images. You used to be able to get stuff like that at ritz... didn't seem to keep them in business, though.
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We've had very good results from Walgreens, but I'm sure it varies by location.
So what if they are no better than a $200 printer, you'll spend another $200 on ink in no time printing photos.
We only have a b/w laser printer at home and do all color photos at Walgreens. It's saving us so much money that I doubt we'll ever buy a color printer again.
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We've had very good results from Walgreens, but I'm sure it varies by location.
So what if they are no better than a $200 printer, you'll spend another $200 on ink in no time printing photos.
We only have a b/w laser printer at home and do all color photos at Walgreens. It's saving us so much money that I doubt we'll ever buy a color printer again.
It should be pretty straightforward to determine which is cheaper. I print photos rarely, and use the printer for more than just photos. For me, it makes sense to print at home on the rare occasion I actually want to print something. Usually only done if I produce something worth framing and hanging on the wall. I think I printed less than 10 photos last year. I did use the printer to send a number of faxes, scan a bunch of old photos, and print/scan various forms.
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People still print photos? (Score:5, Interesting)
My mom occasionally prints photos. I have not printed a photo in years, since computer monitors are now more than good enough. My kids have never printed one. I don't think "printing photos" is a growth business.
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I don't think "printing photos" is a growth business.
My 73 year old mother prints digital photos... On her iMac. I'm sure it's easy to do on Windows too - so yeah, where's the market for this?
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...which is the argument for having a $60 inkjet photo printer that also does double duty as a flatbed scanner.
It's not an argument for the 2013 version of internet cafes.
If you want something printed out now, you don't want to bother with Kinkos or Walmart or CVS or even this silly thing.
Think grandchildren. (Score:3)
Will your digital pictures still be as accessible to your grandchildren as your grandmother's photographs are to you?
This is one of those recurring "ask Slashdot" questions. How do I preserve the digital images or recordings so that my grandchildren can see them or hear them?
Physical copies of pictures is still the best solution when you're talking about 50 years later.
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Physical copies of pictures is still the best solution when you're talking about 50 years later.
Nope. Despite storage under mostly controlled conditions, some of the color 35mm film my wife scanned in the '90s is visibly screwed up if rescanned in the '10s. Some kind of analysis would probably make a great kids science project.
Yeah yeah black and white on archival acid free paper with extremely careful processing (to prevent long term fixer stains) MIGHT be OK in 50 years, plus or minus water damage, etc. But I wouldn't bet on it, and I wouldn't bet on random color prints from the instant-photo-kio
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Physical copies of pictures is still the best solution when you're talking about 50 years later.
Nope. Despite storage under mostly controlled conditions, some of the color 35mm film my wife scanned in the '90s is visibly screwed up if rescanned in the '10s. Some kind of analysis would probably make a great kids science project.
Yeah yeah black and white on archival acid free paper with extremely careful processing (to prevent long term fixer stains) MIGHT be OK in 50 years, plus or minus water damage, etc. But I wouldn't bet on it, and I wouldn't bet on random color prints from the instant-photo-kiosk lasting very long. I've also seen some weird fading on inkjet prints.
The best solution is keep copying it. Keep that data live and always on the latest media.
The problem with digital media is that it is usually an all-or-nothing affair. Physical photos degrade, but even the earliest photos can still be deciphered. Put physical photos in an box and forget about them. They might fade over 50 years, but after that you will be dead and won't care anyway.
With digital media, you need to be vigilant, always copying the files from old media to new, periodically copying to/from the same media to make sure the data is still good, etc. It is a lot of effort. I keep
Re:Think grandchildren. (Score:4, Funny)
It is a lot of effort.
It should be ZERO additional effort. If you even have to think about it, then you are doing it wrong. I just copy the photos from my camera to my laptop, and then do nothing else. Within an hour they are automatically copied to a backup server in my closet. Within 24 hours, they are automatically copied to a git repository on a raid-based cloud server located a thousand miles away. None of this requires any additional effort because it is using mechanisms that are already in place to back up all my email, source code, business documents, etc. When I buy a new computer, I just copy all my data, and the photos are just copied along with everything else. No additional effort is required.
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The originals are what should be modded funny.
The cult of anti-intellectualism has achieved new lows.
Backing up your photos is not a bother. There are a legion of tools that will make it easy and automated and will even ensure that your data is offsite. Doing it manually is also pretty trivial too.
You could simply have a directory called "Stuff I Want to Keep" and just copy that from place to place using the GUI of your choice.
Storage is big cheap and plentiful. Interfaces are shiny and happy. Most people c
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What if the originals become corrupted and I back up files which are useless because I didn't notice?
This is a solid question.
I have been burned by a crappy controller subtly corrupting many of my photos to the extent that I wanted to implement a version control system in my offsite backup uploading scheme. If no corruption occurs, version control does nothing. If it does occur, very little extra data is stored.
I ran into problems with larger (binary) files (the target offsite system is just a NAS) using SVN and switched back to a basic rsync setup. Perhaps it is time to check again for a version control s
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Odd, I've been doing the opposite, digitizing a century's worth of family stuff (photos, LPs, VHS tapes, cassettes).
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I'm calling BS. I have black and white family pictures over a hundred years old and they're just fine. I'm seeing color shifting on prints from the 60s (color before that was relatively rare.) Nothing that can't be rescanned and color corrected. Figure digital photography that seriously competes with 35mm film has only been around for what, 10 years and competes with 110 for 15 years, the chances of seeing any real problem with media bit rot is limited. There are now good archival digital media options M-Di
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Will your digital pictures still be as accessible to your grandchildren as your grandmother's photographs are to you?
My grandmother's photos are NOT available to me. She had a camera and loved to take pictures. But I have no idea where they are today. Maybe in a box in an attic or drawer somewhere. Maybe in a landfill. I have no idea.
This is one of those recurring "ask Slashdot" questions.
Yes it is recurring question, but a very annoying one, since the answer is always the same: put the images on at least two different types of media, and store them in at least two geographical locations. Then move to new media as the old becomes outdated.
My photo archive is about 100GB.
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No, the questions asked in most "ask Slashdot" questions related to this are about a means of preserving them for a long period of time. The problem's that this is not the good way around it.
Instead of attempting to find a CD that'll last 100 years or tapes that last 200 or engraved sapphires that last 1000, make your photo albums part of your living data. Keep them on your hard drive, properly backed up (preferably one on-site and one off-site) and just transfer them around as necessary. If one backup or t
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I have plenty of photographs that have faded or been damaged, and only at roughly 20 years old. The scans made of those pictures when they were first made however still live on as pixel perfect as day one.
Ironically, my current primary computers (a core i7 desktop, and a quad xeon server in the basement for VMs, including my storage server) have between them a full copy of every other computer I've ever owned in the past. All the way back to my very first Apple//, with a collection of disk image files and
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The only trick to keeping digital data alive, is to migrate it to technology considered currently stable BEFORE the current storage tech it's using becomes old.
Well no. There's another trick, an adequate backup. It's an old trick, but people still seem to forget it. I don't back up my PC because I can reinstall it, but I store data I actually care about on external disks and I buy them in twos, so that I can make backups with UUID and a tune2fs command (to generate a new UUID and change the volume label so I can mount both at once if I choose.) I haven't lost any data in a very long while. The backup disk currently goes into a fire safe, since I have nowhere bette
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Most of my grandmother's photos probably didn't make it to me.
On the other hand, digital photos are trivial to copy. If you scale them down, they are even trivial to scale and can fit on just about any consumer device with storage capacity.
Physical media only seems better because it was lucky enough to survive. Much like cultural artitfacts of an older age, it's simply what managed to stay around and not be forgotten. So it ends up making all old stuff seem better than it really is.
Physical media requires a
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My wife's grandmother died today. A few years back, when she was still somewhat coherent and could still see a little, we treated her to a Christmas party where we showed her her own old slides, which she hadn't seen in decades.
We had to find and rent a slide projector, which wasn't cheap. Then, many of the slides from the 60s had horrible color damage - only red was left.
We have them all in climate-controlled storage now. At some point, I'll buy a decent slide scanner and scan them all in. Slides are a
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Will your digital pictures still be as accessible to your grandchildren as your grandmother's photographs are to you?
Probably more accessible. All the old photos I have are badly degraded, that doesn't happen with a digital file.
Re:Think grandchildren. (Score:5, Insightful)
Physical copies of pictures from 50 years ago stored in common household conditions are barely legible. Digital photos at least have the advantage of consistently producing exact copies, so with a bit of care you can indefinitely prolong their lives. With paper or film you're copying already deteriorated image with techniques that add their own imperfections to blur and blemishes of previous copyings and years.
Ah, no, the 50 year old photos stored in the common household shoebox are, more often than not, perfectly "legible".
Virtually always so if they were in black and white.
In fact the lament of the current generation of digital photos is that they ALL die with the first hard disk failure, or
on-line account lapse, or they are buried under a mountain of crap in a Facebook account.
The old printed snapshots usually required a much larger disaster such as a fire or flood to totally destroy them.
Because virtually nobody prints digital photos, just about the only people who ever see them are the original photographer.
Nobody has the coffee table photo book anymore. These used to be easy to create, the natural side product of having to
have your film developed and printed.
Now you have to have special papers, Ink, a pretty good printer, and a lot of technical skill and patience to print them out at home.
Photo albums are actually harder to make today.
As for showing your digital photos, the only thing worse than the obligatory slide show is hovering over someone's shoulder
looking at photos on a laptop, or the few emailed samples.
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I disagree, strongly.
I just go to walmart.com and have them print the stuff out on their Fujifilm Digital Minilab Frontier 390 [blogspot.com].
And then I pick up the stuff sometime later, since I'm usually in there at least a couple of time
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How the heck are you storing your photographs?
I've found some during a major cleanup of my *outside* storage locker. (exposed to winter conditions, high humidity and hot temperatures for the last 12 years). *NONE* of them were deteriorated. I have pictures here (from my great-grandmother) that are still fine, and those are much older than 50 years.
OTOH, my 15 year old undevelloped films won't probably be as lucky (those were inside though)
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The consumer-grade media that existed at the time wasn't archival quality.
So says piles of Luddite nay-sayers. Though, years after the dates of initial failure have passed, I haven't heard of anyone that lost a single CDR that was cared for (I know more than one that lost professional CD or consumer CD for having left it in a car in the sun).
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> Digital copies of pictures stored on cheap CD-R or floppy disks from 1990 will be barely readable in 2040
Anything I had of value in 1990 has already been taken off of it's original media. It's already replicated into several copies. Old data is pretty much by definition SMALL data so it can easily be replicated to the empty spaces of EVERY device you own (mobile or otherwise).
If anything, the problem is not "preservation". If anything, the problem is now that your data might live forever and also be ou
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If anything, the problem is now that your data might live forever and also be out of your control.
Not if the hard disk AND its twin backup both crash when you're trying to transfer the data somewhere else. I lost 80,000 of my dead mother's photographs. I can hear her screaming at me now, lamenting "Only pixels! My life's work is only a bunch of fucking pixels!"
How right she was, it turns out. Oops. I fucked up and lost your life's work, Mom. My bad. I wish I had printed more of them.
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I can still see the business in large scale printing, like for hanging it up on a wall... but the 10x15 or 13x18 paper copies? Nah.... And for the photos on the wall, it's not exactly an impulse buy. I can just do this at a bunch of services online that work really well. I just don't see the market either.
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I don't think this a good business idea either, but nor do I agree that computer monitors are good enough. They're a lot more convenient, yes, and they're a lot brighter, which can often be very useful. However, the resolution of most computer monitors is less than the resolution of even an 8x10, you can only view the picture wherever your monitor is, and you can only see them when the monitor isn't being used for something else. There's a lot of value in prints suitable for putting up on a wall or even jus
Walmart (Score:2)
Not every one lets computers control their lives and every time I'm at Walmart or London Drugs the print stations are full of people printing photos.
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At the moment, I can go to the CVS about 100 yards from my house, or the wallie-world half a mile away, and get prints from something like 12c/each.
Separate stores for this purpose? And somehow these stores will be more common and closer than the drugstores that pop up like mushrooms on street corners?
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Disclaimer: Not a photo professional by any means, but I do pay attention to industry trends.
Once again, proving the danger of extrapolating from your personal experience to the population-at-large - combined with knowing pretty much nothing about the topic.
Contrary to popul
But why? (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't see the point of printing photos these days. All our old prints sit gathering dust in boxes in a closet. The only time anyone uses them is when I get them out as I gradually scan them all into a computer, hopefully before they all fade.
Now we look at our old photos more than we ever used to, blown up to a nice size on our TV in the living room. Added bonus: offsite backup copies in case of fire/tornado/whatever.
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And this is w
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Helpful hint: I don't think the items you've been buying are for what you think they're for. Those generic shit pictures are just placeholders. To hang up your own warm and personal pictures, you're
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I don't think he means the pictures that come free in the frames, but rather the low-quality art prints and posters you can find at many decorating-oriented stores. You know, like what every college kid has hanging in his room.
Desperation is a hell of a drug... (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm honestly surprised that an idea this stupid managed to get enough funding for a startup, let alone enough to drape Polaroid's necrotic brand across the venture...
There are, already, about a zillion retail photo-printing options available, if you actually need such a thing. Most of the chain pharmacies that used to(possibly still do) offer cheap 35mm processing have a kiosk or two for printing from digital media. They always look a trifle shabby; but the infrastructure is there already, and should retail printing take off in a given market, it'd be cheap and quick for any such location to swap in a slightly nicer kiosk. Office supply places, Fedex/Kinkos, and various other outfits also offer retail printing services(again, while currently rather business-drab, it'd be little more than a firmware update and some new posters if they want to make the process more 'hip'.)
And, for those who don't need instant gratification, pictures on mobile phones are, what, 1-3 seconds away from the internet and its cut-price photo printing services? I'd assume that at least some of them have already released 'apps' to make it easier to order directly from your phone's internal photo storage. If not, they certainly could, and fairly quickly. The various online services onto which photos are commonly uploaded are similarly well placed.
I'm just not seeing where these guys are supposed to fit in a market whose saturation is masked only by customer disinterest...
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Re:Desperation is a hell of a drug... (Score:4, Informative)
"The basic Polaroid-style printouts will start at about $15 and be ready at the store within five to 10 minutes, Fotobar founder and CEO Warren Struhl told me. Prints on more exotic materials, or with framing and matting, will ship from a manufacturing facility within three days."
As I noticed by reading the article, these guys are offering the same damn thing as their existing competitors. The only onsite capabilities are your basic CVS mini-lab level quick print stuff, albeit with a markup for that iconic polaroid border, and any of the oddities are processed offsite, just like all the online photo finishers who offer all kinds of weird printing options without the trouble of going to a store.
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necrotic brand
That's a nice phrase. Your invention? I sat here for a couple minutes trying to think of other necrotic brands. Dead and rotting but haven't been entirely excised from culture yet... "SCO"? "Atari"? "CompUSA?"
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Re:Drug store printing (Score:2)
Most drug store printing include online printing. Just look for it. Using Wallgreens for an example because it was mentioned as a typical drugstore offering photo printing. See the upload tab?
http://photo.walgreens.com/walgreens/welcome [walgreens.com]
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Dude.
They're opening these shops in Florida. They're not targeting us. They're targetting our parents.
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My Mom has her own photo printer. My grandma would never have gotten a camera phone, and in any case she's a lousy market as she passed away some time ago.
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so she is now voting in Chicago??
but yes i do not think this will fly
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What a great choice of market niche. Pick a market that is scheduled to die in the next few years. Even my parents gave up on photo prints a long time ago, and I'm almost 50. They're targeting my grandparents but they're all dead , I'm sad to say.
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My mum has a fairly old printer, which has:
a) several card slots for various memory cards (ie. built in card reader)
b) the driver lets you use the card reader in Windows, so you can look at the pics on the screen as well
c) a small, built-in colour screen on the printer
d) buttons to select which photo you want to print
e) a "print photo" button.
So all you do is, insert card straight from you camera, select the pic on the printer's screen and print it. You don't even need to turn on the PC, the printer does it
They Should Also Partner with FedEx (Score:5, Funny)
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naah . . . I'll take a picture of that physical thingie with my phone, and send it to my friends . . .
hawk
Polaroid sc1630? (Score:2)
The company has gone through a couple of bankruptcies, and has tried to reinvent itself with a number of less-than-popular products including: an Android powered "smart camera"
Was this referring to the Polaroid sc1630 that was a rebranded Altek Leo / Aigo A8 [engadget.com]device, or the upcoming IM1836 camera?
Printing Photos (Score:3)
My Mum's photo-mad. She (and my Father and brother) collectively have about $25,000 worth of high-end amateur gear, regularly take classes, and go on photo safaris. Prior to the digital revolution, she had albums upon albums of print photos.
She hasn't printed one now for over 10 years. None of us in my family have. We still get physical photos, but nowadays they're always either large canvas prints for hanging on a wall, or photobooks (like those produced by albumworks and others). The traditional single print? Haven't seen one for a decade. I don't think this is a winning proposition.
This Thinking (Score:2)
This thinkng is what doomed them in the first place.
No future for this (Score:2)
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It's a neat point.
One interesting thing about photos nowadays is that they're pretty much disposable. Much like spam, you take pictures of everything because it don't cost nothin' and, what the hell, if you take 1000 pictures and one of them is awesome, you're ahead of the game. But the vast majority of them are garbage which, if they disappeared in a sudden hard-drive failure, nothing of value would be lost.
So we share more photos of lesser value.
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That's the blessing and curse of digital photography. Back in the film era, you had a certain number of shots to take. If you have a roll of film with 5 good photos, 1 exceptional one, and the rest all messed up a photo, you needed to pay to get them all developed. So the cost-per-printed-photo was high. Plus, if you snapped away at everything, you would run out of film quickly and would need to buy more. Extra expense.
Nowadays, you can get cards to hold more photos that you need. (I use a 16GB card t
Walmart (Score:2)
Sorry but Walmart and a few stationary stores already do that.
In a word... (Score:2)
No.
Fotobar? (Score:2)
Bahahaha this is gold (Score:2)
wait... they're serious?
Polaroid Parrot is Deceased (Score:2)
This already exists. (Score:2)
It's called almost every Target, Wal-Mart, Walgreens and CVS in the United States. They have little kiosks where you can print from your phone or Facebook or Flickr or SD card or whatever.
And they don't have to support the infrastructure of a whole store by themselves. In fact they don't even have to be particularly profitable since part of the deal is you'll wander the rest of the store and buy stuff while waiting for your prints.
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Exactly. The high end market already owns their own printers. The low end market is already served. And if they take this idea to the developing world instead of USA, they will find that there is already a cottage industry of small graphical shops that get the job done with staff that gets paid $5 a day, and where the capital consist of a beat up old pc, and an old photo printer retrofitted to support continuous ink fed instead of the expensive brand name cartridges. You see them in shacks and mall kiosks a
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Why would you go to a cafe to do that, though? Even if it turns out to be a popular idea, they're going to get undercut by pure-play online vendors who need to hire a fraction of the staff, and can rent smaller, lower-upkeep offices in less expensive areas.
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Yea but they have to order it and it takes a few days to arrive. You can do that online in a bunch of places as well. Now if they were an actual bar, serving alcohol and offered instant tattooing of your photos they might be onto something.
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Even Walmart offers options such as that. This is basically one-hour photo wrapped to look like an Apple store. The overhead will be hilarious, and they will go under inside a year.
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Except that I can go in to my local branch of Jessops or Happy Snaps to do that already.
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Turn your instagram "artsy" photo into a tattoo in 45 minutes or less at the mall ! This might work !
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I wonder how difficult automated tattooing would be. If human skin were a well-behaved medium(which it isn't) it would be pretty trivial, you'd basically just need a pen plotter with slightly better vibration damping. Given the tendency to unpredictable elastic deformation and other nuisances, though, you might need a fairly sophisticated machine vision and possibly some pressure sensitive manipulator appendages to track, and where necessary modify, the target skin surface's configuration relative to the ta
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Actually this isn't a bad idea. You would need a print head that shot small amounts of ink at high velocity (like the airgun inoculation devices) causing the ink to penetrate the top layers of the epidermis (this would also be tremendously less painful than standard tatoos.) Also you could use inks that could be easily decomposed by laser light for later removal as desired by the wearer. You would need to stabilize the print head with respect to the skin, some kind of robotic assembly that you wear on the a
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You would need to stabilize the print head with respect to the skin, some kind of robotic assembly that you wear on the area getting the tattoo perhaps.
Just use machine vision. Supposedly the laser eye surgery blasters won't blast unless the embedded camera sees everything is lined up properly. Unsure if that's unusual, merely common, or required by medical regulation and also unsure about how its changed over time. Or it could all be BS that the doc told my coworker so he wouldn't freak out.
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A different ring altogether...
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Wow, absolutely clueless.
Fotobar?
s/t//
Enough said.
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Another dead idea. Quite unfortunate really.
The buggy whip people found a new lease on life in pr0n and related activities. The camera people need to do the same.
Get rid of the plastic and the electronics, make it look like a '60s pentax spotmatic or violate some design patents and make it look like a vintage hasselblad, and above all else make it liquid proof. That might actually sell.
Re:Kodak is a company without a product. (Score:5, Insightful)
The buggy whip people found a new lease on life in pr0n and related activities. The camera people need to do the same.
Get rid of the plastic and the electronics, make it look like a '60s pentax spotmatic or violate some design patents and make it look like a vintage hasselblad, and above all else make it liquid proof. That might actually sell.
Part of the appeal of Polaroid photos was the privacy they gave. You could take intimate photos knowing that (a) the photo store clerk wouldn't see the pictures, and (b) there was no negative that later could be abused. If someone was handed the freshly taken photo, the one with the camera didn't have a copy.
Digital cameras with a home printer solves (a), but not (b). This pathetic attempt from the new Polaroid trade mark owners is a step in the wrong direction, as it removes (a) too.
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AC is begging for a link to goatse, isn't he?
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no no no I mean use a antique analog camera as a prop or toy for a theme, more or less. Using a iphone to document fun time is kind of been there done that. Consider 1860 theme night using a civil war era camera (which despite my low /. UID is still way before my time)
Just like using your buggy whip to drive the horses pulling your covered wagon doesn't count (see hot coffee mod for Oregon Trail)
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Darn, wish I had mod points right now.
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A properly-constructed article makes every effort to present a balanced, unbiased story and allow the reader to form their own opinions. By using a question mark in the headline, the writer (or editor) is announcing that he has an opinion he wants you to hear and is making a provocation very similar to what we now call trolling.
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That's actually a wicked idea, crowdsourcing Photoshop skills (that many people don't have) in exchange for micropayments. Someone who knows even a little about Photoshop could make a few bucks, and all of us get better quality pictures.
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End of an era.
If you want printed photos on the go there are still options available.
Fujifilm have an instant photo product, due to patent license issues it wasn't widely available in the west during polaroid's heyday but with polariod out of the picture major vendors in the west have started stocking it. Search for "instax" on amazon and you'll find it.
There is also impossible who have made new film for the old polariod cameras. However it is a LOT more expensive than the instax stuff.
Finally there are portable photo pr
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Yes, it is targeting $15 4x4 prints with fat white borders. The target market is clearly Instagram users, people who think that filtering the crap out of their digital photos to make them look "vintage" is cool.
Aside: I think you'll find that the Walmart printers are dye-sub, not inkjet.
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I think you mean filtering the crap INTO them.
I miss the photo labs of the early 2000s, which had restoration services which tried to filter the crap OUT of your actual vintage photos.
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An earlier post said they use Fujifilm Frontier [fujifilm.com] equipment. Drilling down a bit through their website turned up this PDF [fujifilm.com] for a couple of their models, in which we learn that these machines use red, green, and blue lasers to expose an image onto photo paper, which is then developed with chemicals. It's not dye sublimation or inkjet technology, and while it uses lasers, it's not a xerographic process (what laser printers use). T