To Print or Not To Print
Do you snap your pictures digitally? Increasingly, most of us do. It’s not too hard to find a decent point and shoot digital camera (name brand, 6-7 megapixel resolution, optical zoom) for $250 these days. A good, digital SLR body costs less than $1000, and many of our cell phones have built-in cameras, as well.
But what do you do with your pictures after you have taken them? Do you still go down to the photo store to get them printed? Do you print them at home on a photo-quality inkjet printer (the kind where an ink refill almost costs more than the printer itself)? Surprisingly, even though we take a lot of digital photos, we still seem to have a strong desire to print them. According to a recent InfoTrends study, we printed well over 13 billion photos last year Рnot including those prints from traditional film negatives. At the same time, another InfoTrends study shows that we only shared 8 billion digital pictures.
Of course digital photo sharing must be growing faster, right? Catching up to traditional photo prints? Well, yes. But not at the rate you might expect. These same studies conclude that photo printing is growing at about 3% per year, while digital photo sharing is growing at a tepid 8% per year.
Where is the digital photo revolution? Why are we still shelling out $0.12, $0.15, or even $0.20 per print for photographs, when we have complete digital freedom to share, view, and archive them as we wish?
Perhaps the answer is that these activities — sharing, viewing, and archiving — are not yet as easy or satisfying as they need to be. For example, of the 8 billion pictures we shared digitally in 2006, the most prevalent method of transmission was email. But anyone who has ever waited in frustration for the download of a 10MB message (assuming your mail provider allows 10MB messages!) containing a dozen photos knows that email is not the best sharing medium.
Archiving is similarly problematic. Those of us who have experienced a hard disk crash or lost important computer files through other means know that keeping a single copy of our pictures on a desktop or laptop computer is not enough. But how many of us actually take time to back up or archive our digital photos? I even have friends that leave their pictures on their cell phones or cameras rather than deal with uploading them to a PC. For some of these, printing is a means of ensuring that at least one copy of each picture survives the next computer upgrade or accidental folder deletion.
Maybe — just maybe — if there were something that could improve our experience with digital pictures, something that could make it easier, more satisfying, and more secure to share, view, and archive our digital photos… Maybe then we would stop wasting all that money, time, and space on photo prints. Is it possible to bring about the rest of the revolution? Or will our transition to an all digital world take place slowly over the next generation or so? Is there any reason to take things slowly?