All change!

The third quarter of 2007 closes this September after a shake-up in the specification and positioning of dye-sub models from several leading manufacturers. The big news has got to be the positioning of some models at a new price point of around £700 ex vat. During the first half of the year Kodak and Sony more or less inadvertently established this price point through the trade-in deals www.photomart.co.uk ran for them, offering Kodak's 6850 and Sony's UP-DR150 6x8" printers at just £700 if you had an old or competing dye-sub to trade-in against them. Now three manufacturers are positioning some 6x8"/6x9" models permanently at a lower price point, with no strings attached. They are Kodak with their new 605 printer, Mitsubishi with their venerable CP-9550DW, and ICI Olmec with their most excellent new OP1000 print box. All these manufacturers also position other models at the old c.£1,000 price point. Mitsubishi has their new and long awaited CP-9800 (finally a Mitsy as fast as the competition!), and Kodak and Olmec leave their 6850 and OP900 machines at the higher price point. So what differentiates the c.£800 offerings from the c.£1,000? In the case of Mitsubishi and Kodak, the cheaper machines are their slower models. Kodak's new 605 printer is essentially a much lighter version of their 6850 model (though running at a slower speed) in a new, more attractive housing. Mitsy's successful CP-9550DW event printer may be sliding down to a lower price point to make room at the top for their long awaited full-speed CP-9800. And Olmec's new OP1000 box sheds the industrial-strength heavy-duty overbuild of its OP900 sibling, but is actually faster.

NEWSLETTERS, AUGUST 2007

www.photomart.co.uk email newsletters from August, 2007:

• issue 47 - Photographer Is Tesco Bomber?
• issue 46 - Manchester Photo Training!
• issue 45 - Live Footie Photo System!
• issue 44 - Photo Booths Are History!

Our previous month's email newsletters are available here.

John Chillingworth Going Strong!

Veteran Picture Post photographer John Chillingworth is still going strong. We spotted a great article on environmental regulations, contributed by him, in the British Journal of Photography the other week. The article was an in-depth piece on the environmental regulations which are currently having quite an effect on our industry. (John Chilingworth must now be nearing his 80th year.)

World Wakes Up To Event Photography!

Recent weeks have seen event printers and event photography feature in the trade press, in such publications as BJP, Professional Photographer and Digital Photo Pro. Sales of event printers in the UK are now worth many millions of pounds a year, and photographers consume media worth more than twice that. It's about time the industry woke up to the significance of this sector.

Kodak Offers Continue!

www.photomart.co.uk is to continue to offer Kodak's flagship 6850 dye sub printer for just £700 with a trade in until the end of September. www.photomart.co.uk will also continue to bundle media with the Kodak 9810 portrait printer and the Kodak 6850.

Snappy Snaps Ulster Connection!

Radio Ulster's new hit drivetime DJ, Alan Simpson ("the man who brought the Undertones to Portrush"), turns out to be the brother of Snappy Snaps founder and Marketing Director, Ann Simpson. Snappy Snaps is a high street photo processing franchise with outlets in London and the South East.

Jessops Plummets To All Time Low!

Shares in troubled camera retailer Jessops dived 40% to an all time low in mid August on rumours that the plc may be in very serious financial difficulty and about to call in the administrators. Jessops denies the rumours. The share price remains 15-20% down. The Jessops shares have been supported by a spread of City institutions that progressively increased their holdings in the plc earlier this year. Jessops has so much debt and so few assets that creditors could only take a bath in the event the company were to go into administration. No one wants to let Jessops go down.

Photographer Accused Of Tesco Bomb Threat!

The man charged with the recent £1M Tesco bomb threat blackmail attempts turns out to have been a photographer. Philip McHugh, unemployed at the time of the bomb threats, had felt he had to give up a former day job in a regional VAT department following a News of The World sting. The News of the World used two people posing as models to set the photographer up for a story that falsely represented him as an exploiter of women with a kinky interest in spanking. Mr McHugh won damages against the tabloid as a result. However, he later had to sell his home and had difficulty holding down a steady job. Mr. McHugh had also worked as a part-time college photography tutor. The Tesco bomb threats closed 14 stores around the country for security checks.

PHARMACIES GUARANTEED LOW PRICES!

LONDON, 21 August 2007 - Nationwide UK photographic wholesaler, www.photomart.co.uk, has introduced a unique low price guarantee exclusively for pharmacies. The guarantee assures pharmacists of the lowest prices for selected photo products, including SONY ID photo systems and media, the SONY SnapLab mini photo kiosk and its media, and certain Mitsubishi kiosks and the media for those. Details of the Pharmacy Guarantee are available on the www.photomart.co.uk website, or by calling 0870 011 5761. "Community pharmacies have always been very important to my photo supplies business", wholesaler Lewis Martindale (the MD of www.photomart.co.uk) said. "For instance, when I hired my Marketing Manager I chose someone from a family of three generations of pharmacists. Now I'm able to offer pharmacies a unique price-beater guarantee on some of the products my company specializes in - SONY ID photo systems and SnapLab mini photo kiosks, and the media for them. The pharmacists are some of my best customers, it's the least I can do, honestly."
Please direct any enquiries about this release to:
Simon Towler CertWebApps(Open)
Marketing Manager
www.photomart.co.uk
direct line: +44 (0)208 501 8856
email: design2@photomart.co.uk

Sony Vista Drivers!

SONY have now released Microsoft Windows Vista drivers for their highly successful UP-DR150 dye sub photo printer. The drivers are available for download from http://www.sony.net/Products/DP-driver/Win/dl-vista-dr150.html Until now, none of the leading event printers from any of the big brand manufacturers had Vista drivers. Joint first with SONY in Vista compatibility is Kodak. Their new 605 event printer is the first that we know of to actually ship with Vista drivers in the box.

Lower Prices To Ireland!

www.photomart.co.uk has reduced its shipping charges to the island of Ireland to just £10 per parcel. Delivery on the island of Ireland is available on a Two Day service.

Tesco Offers Photo Software!

UK supermarket giant Tesco is extending it's sub-£20 photo editing software to hundreds of stores around the country after successful trials. The photo editing software is just one title in a whole family branded for Tesco by Formjet. The best selling family members are the anti-virus, internet security and office software. All titles taken together sold almost 25,000 units during the trial.

Snappy Snaps Selling Digital Images!

Snappy Snaps, a high street photo lab franchise with outlets in London and the South East, is claiming that is experiencing demand for providing its customers with digital images retouched specifically for use on social networking web sites. Snappy Snaps is offering the retouching service, with digital delivery of the image, from just £10. The service improves the customers appearance in the image they have chosen to use on their social networking web pages.

Prints Aren't Important!

Graham McFarland, CEO of ExpressDigital, has become the latest blogger to point out that professional photographers may need to start moving away from a business model based on selling prints. Graham predicts that, although printing may never decline, providing customers with digital images will eventually become the norm rather than the exception.

Advanced Camera Of The Year!

Fujifilm's FinePix S5 Pro DSLR has won the EISA European Advanced Camera of the Year 2007/08 Award. EISA is an organization whose membership is comprised of European magazines in the photo and audio video segments.

Pharmacies Guaranteed Low Prices!

www.photomart.co.uk has introduced a unique low-price guarantee exclusively for pharmacies. On selected products the company guarantees to beat any competitor price. The products include the SONY SnapLab mini photo kiosk, SONY's ID photo systems, media for those systems, as well as Mitsubishi photo kiosks and media for them too.

New Kodak Dye Sub!

Kodak launched its latest 6x8 thermal photo printer last week. The Kodak 605 is available on special introductory promotion as a bundle with a first roll of half-price media. www.photomart.co.uk's assessment is that the 605 is essentially a Kodak 6800 in a lighter weight package. It is not replacing the faster Kodak 6850 but will be sold as a cheaper alternative to it. It uses the same media as 6800 series printers.

Manchester Photo Training!

Cancel your foreign holiday and forget about watching the footie! - www.photomart.co.uk is coming to Manchester! We will be presenting the next in our roadshow series of Event Photography Training Days at the Hilton Manchester Airport Hotel on August 30, 2007. The training day will be presented by the UK's most sought after lecturer on Event Photography, Keith Trainor, the BPPA Event Photographer of the Year 2005. Tickets, which are subsidized by SONY and ExpressDigital, are priced at £50 + VAT and are available from www.photomart.co.uk or in the UK by phoning 0870 011 5761. The class size will be kept to a small number (about a dozen delegates) and the entire day will be devoted to training. It will cover setting up a backdrop and lights, shooting subjects against a green screen, superimposing them on digital backdrops, printing text and borders, using fast event printers with workflow productivity software, and the business aspects of Event Photography.

NEWSLETTERS, JULY 2007

www.photomart.co.uk email newsletters from July, 2007:

• issue 43 - West Mids Photo Day!
• issue 42 - Annie & The Queen!
• issue 41 - Photo Entrepreneurs!
• issue 40 - Photo Media Costs SLASHED!

Our previous month's email newsletters are available here.

NEW DIGITAL ALBUM PRESS!

LONDON, 6 August 2007 - www.photomart.co.uk, one of the UK's leading photographic suppliers, formally launched a new range of photo book and digital album manufacturing equipment in the UK today. The Digitrans Hot Press is the machine at the heart of www.photomart.co.uk's Digitrans photo book binding solutions. The Digitrans photo book binding method enables you to produce premium hand bound photo books and digital albums at a rate of up to 180 a day (depending on the size of book and the efficiency of your bindery operation). The essence of the Digitrans system is that it uses dry sheets of cold glue for adhesion. This is called hot-melt glue. It's not wet, sticky or even tacky at room temperature, but when it's heated in a hot press it behaves as a perfect binding glue (sometimes called American binding). This is the glue the www.photomart.co.uk system uses to stick the photo pages produced on your minilab to the high quality backing papers of photo books and digital albums. Uniquely, this glue enables you to produce books with pages that will not curl or warp, but will lie perfectly flat, resulting in a premium hand bound product that can be offered at a very high margin. (Hand bound digital albums are typically sold at prices ranging from about £70 to over £400 each). The Digitrans Hot Press consists of an electro-pneumatic press to keep the pages of your photo book compressed while they are gently heated to the correct temperature, with automated precision timing, and then allowed to cool. Up to 180 complete photo books a day can be produced on the Digitrans Hot press. The pneumatic compressor is an almost silent one, housed in the pedestal of the unit. It can power not only the hot press, but also an optional additional top mounted cold press (for greater workflow productivity). The Digitrans method is supported by a complete and varied range of consumables, enabling you to produce a wide variety of photo books and digital albums. And www.photomart.co.uk also sell a complete range of supporting Digitrans bindery equipment, to allow you to equip a photo book bindery of your own to any level of specification you require, for efficient workflow and high productivity. The Digitrans system allows you to take the ultimate final step in turning out premium hand bound photo books and digital albums. The system is unbeaten in its versatility, the quality of the product it can produce, and the range of different outer covers it can utilize - yet it is a fraction of the cost of larger competing systems. It should provide an ideal entrepreneurial opportunity for pro labs, mini labs, photographers, studios and even start-up photo entrepreneurs. The skills required to make hand-bound photo books can be taught to new staff quite quickly (everything you really need to know can be learned in half an hour), or you can easily hire trained and experienced bindery staff from the commercial print sector. The Digitrans Hot press is on display and in operation in www.photomart.co.uk's London showrooms. Call 0870 011 5761 and make an appointment to see it, any time. We also have demonstration videos available. Digitrans - it's the only way to produce top quality, hand bound, premium photo books and digital albums. Check it out at www.photomart.co.uk today!

[Picture: Filename: photomart_024.jpg Caption: The Digitrans digial album photo book press. Copyright: www.photomart.co.uk, 2007. Permission granted for fair use in connection with this release.]
Please direct any enquiries about this release to:
Simon Towler CertWebApps(Open)
Marketing Manager
www.photomart.co.uk
direct line: +44 (0)208 501 8856
email: design2@photomart.co.uk

The Post Office has disowned and repudiated a letter that had been issued to subpostmasters, threatening them with the loss of their compensation for the closure of their branch if they failed to toe the company line when talking to customers about the coming closures. The letter threatened visits by "mystery shoppers" to the subpostoffices to check up on compliance. The Post Office has now apologized for the letter and assures subpostmasters that the measures threatened in it would not be taken.

www.photomart.co.uk is introducing a complete range of photo book binding equipment to the uk. Photo labs will be able to kit out a DigiTrans photo book bindery from as little as £8,000. www.photomart.co.uk's DigiTrans system uses a very effective hotmelt glue that allows the photo books to be bound in such a way that they will always lie flat and will not curl.

Kodak is suing the Matsushita companies, including JVC & Panasonic, for infringing its intellectual property. The legal action follows years of discussion of the matter between the two corporations and relates to patents applicable to digital cameras and camcorders. In recent years Kodak has run a successful campaign of seeking settlements with a succession of rival manufacturers in respect of the corporation's intellectual property. Kodak supports a lot of research and owns many patents.

PHOTO BOOTHS ARE HISTORY!

ITV's "The Time of Your Life" television series recently featured an outdoor Photo-Me booth as a sort of time travel device. The Glasgow Herald, with true Glaswegian sensitivity, pointed out that these booths are practically history themselves. Photo-Me is breaking up and is planning to sell off its vending division, which is responsible for photo booths. ID photos from booths have suffered from high rejection rates in recent years as specifications for the photographs have become stricter, particularly in passport applications. Many customers now get their photo taken in-store instead on a digital ID Photo camera.