GREEN AND YELLOW GIANTS RAISE PRICES!

•  Green & Yellow giants Raise Prices! – The two surviving giants of the traditional photo industry, Fujifilm and Kodak, have both announced massive global price hikes in film and paper. The increases are blamed on factors including global commodities costs – particularly of oil, but also of silver. They become effective by July this year.

Photographers and photo labs are facing a double whammy: not only are analogue materials going up, but most manufacturers' synthetic papers have gone up too. These are used in dye sub printers, photo kiosks and booths, and in ID photo systems. Even the cost of inkjet inks is going up! The increases are as high as an eye-watering twenty per cent in some cases! In the UK these rises can be exacerbated by the weakness of the pound against the euro, which adds to the cost of transferring continental stocks into this country.

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KODAK MPA WEDDING & PORTRAIT AWARDS 2008!

• Kodak MPA Wedding & Portrait Awards 2008! – It's come around again! The 2008 MPA Kodak Wedding & Portrait Awards is now open for entries! Entry fees are just a pound a pop, you can submit as many entries as you like, and all the money goes to the PACE Centre, a charity for physically disabled children, based in Aylesbury, Bucks. [expand story >>>]

The competition is open to any professional photographer (not just MPA members) but the materials used need to be from Kodak. Closing dates for entries are May 31 and August 30, 2008.



The Pace Centre (shown in their YouTube video above) helps children with motor disorders (such as cerebral palsy). PACE provides education and therapy for children from 6 months to 12 years and beyond. [add comment]

DRY LABS DEBUT AT FOCUS!

• Dry Labs Debut at FOCUS ! – The FOCUS on Imaging show is in full swing right now at the NEC, and one of the themes this year seems to be dry lab. Noritsu and Fujifilm have hardware-identical models on show, and Kodak is showing its Apex system. Apex is based on what Kodak have always called thermal technology (dye sub to the rest of us), while the Noritsu and Fujifilm systems are industrial inkjets. [expand story >>>]

"Our new Frontier DryLab 400 is an inkjet lab", John Grayston of Fujifilm tells PhotoWeek! "It prints up to 10"x36", it's very quick, and it's a very easy process. The price is expected to be about £15.5K and we're aiming for a cost-per-print that's closer to wet lab costs than dye sub ones."



Lewis Martindale, Managing Director of www.photomart.co.uk (on stand M-2 at the show) told us his company would supply both the Fujifilm and the Kodak solutions: "Whether the future is wet or dry, inkjet or thermal", he said, "that future will be delivered by www.photomart.co.uk"

Graham Hill of Kodak assured us that his corporation's new Apex lab, although the technology is thermal, should deliver a cost-per-print comparable to wet lab. The media used in the new Apex lab is different to that used in dye sub instant print kiosks, and presumably costs less to produce. [add comment]