Special Photo Gifts From Easy-to-Use Photo Kiosks by Alfred DeBat
With all the new photo kiosks that are on the market, it can be difficult to tell what they enable you to do. Alfred DeBat shows you the best benefits of new easy-to-use kiosks.
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If you haven’t tried printing your digital images at a retail store photo kiosk, you have a pleasant surprise awaiting you. Most photo kiosks offer easy-to-use templates or layouts to produce a wide variety of cards and gifts using your photographs. You have the advantage of being in the driver’s seat, as you personally select, crop, and edit your photos at the kiosk. Everything turns out just the way you want it.
The two kiosks most frequently encountered are the Fujifilm GetPix Photo Center and the Kodak Picture Maker. Both kiosks offer many similar functions, such as the ability to make enlargements, crop and zoom into images, fix red-eye portraits, correct and adjust color balance, modify brightness and contrast, and convert color images to sepia and black-and-white photo prints. The simple-to-use kiosks use touch-screen monitors, whereby users see their photos on computer-like monitors. You indicate what you want to do by merely touching the monitor screen. The maximum print size is frequently 8-by-10 inches. The kiosks accept digital photo images directly from camera memory cards, and other digital storage media, such as photo CDs.
Fujifilm GetPix Photo Center
In addition to making prints and enlargements, kiosks also offer the ability to produce photo gift products, such as adding borders to photos, producing holiday and special events cards by adding text to the photos, and producing attractive photo calendars. Some models also permit the creation of permanent photo CDs from your camera’s memory card images, so that the memory cards can be immediately reused. This can be a great advantage when vacationing or when the family desktop computer is not available.
Kodak Picture Maker
One of the newest photo kiosks recently introduced is the Luci from Lucidom Inc., which also offers a special scrapbooking program in addition to standard functions. Tailored especially for scrapbook album pages, Luci produces 8-by-8-inch and 12-by-12-inch prints within photo layouts and borders. There are a great variety of page templates for special events, such as birthdays, graduation, new home, and baby announcements. With a dozen templates in each category, you can select from one to four different photos per page with up to three different format shapes – square, circle, and triangle. Depending upon store location, you can expect to pay less than $6 for an 8-by-8-inch layout and less than $10 for a 12-by-12-inch print. Some photo retailers offer the complete creation of an 8-by-8-inch scrapbook album with six pages and cover for about $70.
This kiosk also permits scanning of vintage and family photographs for use in its printmaking, as well as your kids’ artwork. Families can, therefore, preserve their children’s masterpieces in their scrapbook pages as a photograph. Luci’s maximum print size is 12-by-18 inches, which is perfect for wall-size enlargements and posters.
Luci from Lucidom
The Luci also has the ability to create DVD slide show presentations of your photos and add a musical soundtrack. These DVDs can be played on television sets using DVD-TV players. In addition, the kiosk has all the same abilities of the Fujifilm and Kodak models. You’ll be able to find a Luci kiosk at most Walgreens drugstores, as well as Ritz camera stores and Brooks-Eckerd drugstores.
With all these kiosks you have a great variety of options and templates for personal and special photo gifts that include your personal message. In addition to holiday cards, you can print photo birth announcements, Valentines, and party invitations in sizes from 4-by-6 inches and up.
Generally speaking there are two kinds of color prints produced by kiosks. If the store location has a minilab on site, the print will most likely be made on standard color photographic paper – just like regular color negative prints. Many photographers prefer color photographic paper prints because they reportedly have longer life without visible fading. The other type of photo is a dye-sublimation print, which can be produced by the kiosk without any photo-processing chemicals. The prints are usually produced right inside the kiosk. Some photographers believe that dye-sub prints aren’t as stable as color paper prints. However, if dye-sub prints aren’t continuously exposed to bright illumination (as when they are stored in a photo album), they will provide years of fade-free life.
pxi is coming www.pxidigital.com 2-3 times faster than Kodak on-demand kiosk,imaging up to 40% better quality,customer ease of use superior,turn custmoer around 2-3 times faster.
Posted by: barrie harrop Oct 29, 2006 @ 1:32 AM EST
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Posted by: barrie harrop Oct 13, 2007 @ 7:53 PM EST
i want more explanations about the kiosk, i m realy interest if you can traslat in french, where can i get the product. in asia
