Here’s my feelings on digital printing. Home printers suck… too expensive and hard to do (and is reflected in the dropping market share of home printing vs. retail and online). Online services (like Shutterfly and Ofoto) are nice, but cost more than retail, and have to be mailed to you. Retail printing is great, but do you really want Costco or Walmart to store all of your photos? Are they going to have cool tagging services like Flickr. Ahhh, I think not.

So the best “solution” is for Yahoo! and the retailers to get together, and allow Yahoo! Photos/Flickr digital images to be printed at the retailer of the user’s preference. I don’t want Yahoo! to have some sort of “preferred,” exclusive printing relationship, I want choice. For example, I’d love to upload all my images to Flickr, and have them printed out at my local Costco (which you can’t beat for price and quality). In addition, I am not so wild about having Yahoo! print my photos, and mail them too me. Costco et al., are always going to beat Yahoo! in cost, convenience and probably quality.

However, the retailers probably are still thinking it’s 1998, and they can become the center of a person’s digital image world. That is, they think their brands equal “cool, online, trustworthy, perpetual digital-image store.” Again, I think not. Do you really trust Wal-Mart to store all of your images forever? Yeah, right… lemme offshore that to where ever, and, oh and sorry, you’ll have to upload all of your images.

Yahoo! probably thinks it can own the world and that all of it’s users will want to use their online service. This, of course, is myopic.

I’m waiting for the day when reasonable minds prevail, and everyone figures out that:
Yahoo!’s brand = cool, progressive, perpetual, trustworthy, future-proof digital image archive
Retailers’ brand = great price, convenience, transaction for digital images

Update:2005_04_22
Yahoo! and Target have announced plans that will allow Yahoo! members to print their online photos at Target (Flickr will probably be included too). I imagine that Target paid Yahoo! a “distribution” fee (perhaps payable in advertising on the Yahoo! Network), will have to promote Yahoo! Photos in their stores and will share some of the print revenue with Yahoo!. Yahoo! will most likely have to offer some promotion of the Target service within Yahoo! Photos. Yahoo! probably had leverage in this deal, since it was widely reported that Target has been late to the online photo game.

I think this is a good deal for both companies. It’s a good brand match… both companies are upbrand-mainstream (that is, an up brand from the likes of WalMart).

In the future (assuming Yahoo! plays it’s card right), Yahoo! should be able to capture a disproportionate share of the online digital assets market. This will increase their leverage over retail printing shops, so they should be able to demand a large revenue share of the printing fees.

SanDisk has a pretty cool link of compact, USB card readers called MobileMates. As the verbage on their site says:

SanDisk’s MobileMate line of Mobile Readers are the smallest readers on the market & unique in its compatibility class (SD/miniSD/MultiMediaCard/RS-MMC/TransFlash & Memory Stick/Memory Stick Duo/Memory Stick PRO/ Memory Stick PRO Duo), ideal for memory-enabled mobile phone users and photo travel needs. The flash memory cards can be plugged directly into the readers. No card adapters are required. Carry it with you so you always have access to your important data.

These would be pretty handy if you have an old laptop like mine that doesn’t have a card reader built into it. Plus, they are pretty cheap, running about $20.

Today’s digital camera’s dynamic range is comparable to slide film or about five F stops. Over at Liminous-Landscape, they discuss dynamic range as follows in their Understanding Histograms tutorial.

The digital imaging chip in your camera is very similar to colour transparency film when it comes to its sensitivity to light.

Like slide film, if a part of the image receives too much light it becomes burned out, and if too little light it is rendered as black. A recognizable image is only recorded if the light hitting the chip falls within a range of about 5 F stops. (Remember — each F stop is a doubling or halving of the amount of light hitting the film). With digital things are much the same and even the dynamic range is about the same as for slide film; about 5 stops. Also keep in mind that the total range of brightness values encountered in the real world is only about 10 stops — from the dimmest light that you can read in to the brightest beach or snow scene in which you might find yourself).

With a potential of 10 F stops of light information and shooting with a camera that can only interpret five F stops means that a lot of shots will have areas that are either under or over exposed. There are ways to get around this problem using flashes or split neutral-density filters, but these methods have their limitations.

Another way to increase the effective dynamic range of a camera is to shoot two or more shots of the same scene, and blend them in Photoshop. This technique works well of a lot of situations, but is rather tedious. Luminous-Landscape has a tutorial called Blended Exposures that walks through this process.

Potentially even better (or at least faster), is to use Photomatix software to blend exposures automatically — and for free (Photomatix Basic). I’ve yet to try out Photomatix, but some of the examples on their site look promising. I’m looking forward to trying this software out.

PMA (Photo Marketing Association’s annual show) runs from February 20th-23th, and as DPReview says:

The Photo Marketing Association Annual Show will be held this year at the Orange County Convention Center, Orlando between the February 20th and 23rd. PMA is the photography industry’s most important annual event, it’s the place where the new year’s hottest digital photography products are announced.

Check out DPReview’s full PMA coverage here. I’m sure there will be some great, new digital cameras coming out at this show, so be sure to check DPReview’s site if you’re a digital camera geek.

The PMA show aside, I’ve recently been reading about some new digital cameras that either incorporate ground-breaking features, or have been awesomely re-designed or even one that defines a new digital-camera product category.

Leading the way in novel features, is Konica-Minolta’s Maxxum 7D that features the ‘world’s first digital SLR featuring a body-integral CCD-shift, Anti-Shake (camera-shake compensation) technology that combines enhanced picture quality, performance and improved handling characteristics.’ The 7D gets DPReview’s Highly-Recommended stamp of approval in their recent review, so it’s definitely worth considering if you’re new to the DSLR market, or if you are a Konica Minolta devotee.

The new (so new it’s not listed on Canon’s site yet) Canon EOS 350D raises the bar on entry-level DSLR cameras. DPReview has a preview of the camera here. Some of the awesome improvements include:

Eight megapixel CMOS sensor (not same as EOS 20D)
Second generation CMOS (same generation as rest of current range)
DIGIC II processor (better images, faster processing, less power)
Instant power-on time, faster shutter release, shorter blackout time
Continuous shooting speed increased (3.0 fps vs. 2.5 fps)
Buffer increased (14 JPEG frames vs. 4 JPEG frames)
Image processing time decreased (thanks to DIGIC II)
Compact Flash write speed increased
Smaller body (15 × 5 x 8 mm smaller)
Lighter weight (17% lighter including battery)

And defining a new digital camera market is Epson’s new R-D1. The RD-1 is a rangefinder camera, in a similar market as the analog Leica M-series cameras. If the R-D1 wasn’t three grand, I’d be interested in one. However, Epson will face some competition in this market soon, so stay tuned for lower prices and digital-rangefinder selection. Luminous-Landscape’s review of the RD-1 can be found here (btw, they love it).

If you haven’t tried Costco for digital prints, you might want to — especially for enlargements which are hella cheap. Although shopping at Costco can be a little like hand-to-hand combat, at least you don’t have to run through the regular checkout lines to get your prints, since they can ring you up right at the photo counter.

Walk-in Service
Now have a use for all of those useless 8-32 MB flash memory cards that come bundled with digital cameras. These smaller cards are perfect for loading up the digital images you want to have printed. My local Costco has a slick kiosk that accepts most memory card formats. Using the kiosk you can self-service yourself, and select the finish, size and number of prints you would like.

A quick search on Costco prints brought me to this post. I didn’t know that Costco supports printer profiles (an ICC color profile) , but they do. Since every digital printer has its own unique way of reproducing color, using a profile when editing an image on a calibrated monitor facilitates closer matching of monitor colors to the print colors. If this sounds a bit complicated, it kind of is, but for some background on profiles, read this.

To find out what printer profile is appropriate for your local Costco, just check this page.

Regarding enlargements, make sure you edit your images so that they map to the enlargement size you are printing to. For example, my 4 mega pixel Canon SD300’s largest image size is 2272×1704 pixels which is a ratio of 1.33. A 6×4 print has a ratio of 1.5 and a 7×5 print is 1.4. If you don’t match up the size ratios, you’re going to get random cropping.

Here’s a list of the print sizes and prices that Costco offers (I found these online, so can’t confirm them, but they do seem in the ballpark).

4×6 — $0.14
5×7 — $0.69
8×12 — $1.99
11×14 — $2.99
12×18 — $2.99

Online Service
I haven’t tried Costco’s online photo service, but it looks pretty good. They support printer profiles and have a several print options (glossy or lustre and with or without a border). However, only three print sizes are supported (4×6, 5×7 and 8×10). Prices for the prints are as follows.

4×6 — $0.18
5×7 — $0.69
8×10 — $1.99

It appears that Costco is OEMing the service from Kodak, since you have to visit a co-branded Kodak site to review your archives. Oh, make sure you read the fine print if you rely on any online photo service to store your prints. Certain sites do delete your archives if you aren’t an active member. Of course, I would highly recommend backing up your archives to a hard drive or CD/DVD instead of solely relying on an online service.

Update: 2005_02_15
Check this page for specifics on how to control the cropping of your images when using Costco’s walk-in service.