Duplex Minilab For Better Album Making

Duplex (Double-Sided) Minilab As The Saviour Of The Photo Finishing Industry

The duplex is Prismlab's answer to the dilemmas the recent digital revolution brought for the photo finishing industry. Even most of those photo labs that are already adopted digital processing are still functioning along the old business model of simply waiting for the customers to bring in their holiday and other personal pics. Meanwhile people take a lot more pictures, they get developed much less of them and photo processing labs are forced to lower the margins on developing photographs to try to stay in the game, which on the long run is a suicide mission.

Along with the digital cameras came cheap storage which has changed the way people keep their photographs. Being able to store them on digital media, web servers etc., eliminated the need for immediate developing. With the widely available photo and layout editing softwares people got more creative and demanding with which some photo labs can not keep up technologically.

To not only keep up with but also gain from the new market situation it is necessary to change to consumer's habits to keep on developing. One possible way is to teach customers to order whole albums instead of printing one or two prints. The double faced minilab that prints on both side of the photo paper together with an album binding machine the results can be very appealing. With appropriate pricing, adjusted to local factors and letting customers personalize as much as possible, buying albums instead of individual prints could very soon catch on. A top quality personalized album, a collection of previously hand picked images, with some customer interaction at the making or designing of it will hold a lot more emotional value than same images in only a stack of prints.

The traditional pricing model for most photo labs still in use, the one that increased the price of the prints drastically with each size up, has to be rethinked too. To upsell a couple of 10x15 prints to a 13x18 album with the old price matrix could be very difficult.

Photo finishing is not the only way you can make money with the duplex. The quality of the photographic paper with silver halide emulsion on both sides can anytime compare with coated prints from a print shop. Wich opens up a range of new products that you just didn't do before. Restaurant menus, booklets, business cards and similar illustrations can be printed immediately and in any number. The cost for piece is the same whether you print one or a thousand. And this is still just the same old silver halide emulsion paper, so even though coated on both sides, these prints will be still quite inexpensive.

Although the duplex minilab is of course able to print only photos just like any other digital minilab, to get the new business model right, one should lead the market to think of his shop as the album lab rather than the photo lab.