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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."
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.
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
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.
Physical copies of pictures from 50 years ago stored in common household conditions are barely legible. Digital photos at least have the advantage of consistently producing exact copies, so with a bit of care you can indefinitely prolong their lives. With paper or film you're copying already deteriorated image with techniques that add their own imperfections to blur and blemishes of previous copyings and years.
Ah, no, the 50 year old photos stored in the common household shoebox are, more often than not, perfectly "legible".
Virtually always so if they were in black and white.
In fact the lament of the current generation of digital photos is that they ALL die with the first hard disk failure, or
on-line account lapse, or they are buried under a mountain of crap in a Facebook account.
The old printed snapshots usually required a much larger disaster such as a fire or flood to totally destroy them.
Because virtually nobody prints digital photos, just about the only people who ever see them are the original photographer.
Nobody has the coffee table photo book anymore. These used to be easy to create, the natural side product of having to
have your film developed and printed.
Now you have to have special papers, Ink, a pretty good printer, and a lot of technical skill and patience to print them out at home.
Photo albums are actually harder to make today.
As for showing your digital photos, the only thing worse than the obligatory slide show is hovering over someone's shoulder
looking at photos on a laptop, or the few emailed samples.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
It is a lot of effort.
It should be ZERO additional effort. If you even have to think about it, then you are doing it wrong. I just copy the photos from my camera to my laptop, and then do nothing else. Within an hour they are automatically copied to a backup server in my closet. Within 24 hours, they are automatically copied to a git repository on a raid-based cloud server located a thousand miles away. None of this requires any additional effort because it is using mechanisms that are already in place to back up all my email, source code, business documents, etc. When I buy a new computer, I just copy all my data, and the photos are just copied along with everything else. No additional effort is required.
Which is why you go to the online Walgreen photo ui, upload and order your pictures then pick them up in an hour.