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Can Fotobar Make Polaroid Relevant Again?
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."
check subject.
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.
I keep a copy of goatse on my phone, so I can reupload it and post to slashdot on the go. I went to walmart to get prints of my family reunion and the machine was down, so the kid had to start it up and insisted on helping me. As luck would have it, our friend Goatse was at the top. Long story short, he called the manager and I was asked to leave.
Fuck walmart.
The article specifically mentions printing on different media like metal, paper, wood, clothes and such. So maybe they are on to something!
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.
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...
So people have a convenient, in-store way to share these new-fangled "physical" photos with others. And by share, I mean you go down to the store with your phone, they print the photo and hang it on the wall, and give the customer a stack of cards they can FedEx to their friends. The cards will contain the address of the store, so the friends can come visit and see their photo on the wall.
I sincerely hope you poker faced it and tried to convince the clerk that's just how family reunions roll after a couple beers...
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
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.
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.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
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.
Long before Betteridge came along, I was taught in journalism school that question marks in headlines are the hallmarks of journalists who lack integrity or proper writing skills.
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. It's polarizing and pushes the reader to close his mind to defend his already-held opinions, regardless of whether the reader wants the answer to the question to be yes or no. Good journalism should open the reader's mind to new ideas and new perspectives. A poor journalist writes articles like opinion pieces, and doesn't even know he's doing it.
For writers, if you find yourself using a question mark in your headline, stop, go get some air, step out of your shoes, come back and re-read what you wrote from someone else's perspective to evaluate whether you are a journalist or an opinionated loudmouth.
For readers, when you see a publication that uses question marks in headlines, take it as a sign that the publication is poorly written, poorly edited, or significantly biased. And if you decide to continue reading it, read it with that information in mind. In this case, this is Slashdot, so you have to apply the "Watermelon Principle." When you eat watermelon, you don't eat the seeds. But you don't throw out the whole watermelon just because you're not going to eat the seeds. You eat the fruit and spit the seeds. Slashdot is kind of like that. So are a lot of things.
But have you ever used one? They all really sucks ass, at least the ones I've tried. Walmart are giant asses when it comes to old prints, we tried to get a copy of a third grade photo of my late sis, they refused and said we would have to "get permission from the copyright holder"...uhh dumbasses? Yeah the photographer has been dead over 20 years so how EXACTLY am I supposed to do this? Have a fricking seance? No answer. Walgreen? "There is the machine in the corner, figure it out" was basically the attitude that I got, oh and the card reader only half the slots worked, the half that nobody ever uses because nothing uses those cards...niiice.
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.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Which is why you go to the online Walgreen photo ui, upload and order your pictures then pick them up in an hour.
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.
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.
If tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. - James Madison
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 that can hold over 2,000 photos. More than enough for a vacation.) You can keep all of your photos in digital form, only share the decent ones, and perhaps print the one or two that are exceptional. The cost-per-photo has dropped to nearly nothing.
So with the cost-per-photo at near-zero, there's no reason not to snap away at everything. The same goes for video which used to require a bulky camera and big VHS tapes, but now only requires a tiny cell phone. Yes, in a way, it makes photos like spam, but I think we're better off for it.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.