Windows Vista now supports 77,000 printers, but many photographers have been clobbered by the Microsoft OS's lack of support for professional dye subs. Photo printer manufacturers have been slow to develop Vista drivers for these. Photographers sometimes first learn this when they buy a Vista laptop and find they can't get their dye sub to work with it! [add comment]
• Mitsubishi UK Introduce EasyPhoto! – Mitsubishi's EasyPhoto instant photo printing solution, first previewed this year at PMA in the States, is now available in a European incarnation, and is on sale in the UK. Mitsubishi Electric UK are marketing a configuration of a red CP9550DW-S tied to the new EasyPhoto touch-screen terminal unit as an entry-level digital photo finishing solution for retail environments. Prices at launch start from around £1,200. [expand story >>>]
Event photography kit-hackers anticipating a compact kiosk head for their CP9550s will be disappointed. This touch-screen terminal head will not be sold separately, and will not drive standard grey CP9550DW printers. The kiosk interface of the EasyPhoto is not the same as that of the Mitsubishi Click units favoured as event systems - it is a simplified and slimmed down version. And this unit is said to have no hard drive storage of its own. Guys, contrary to pronouncements by Mitsy marketing in the US, on this side of the pond this one seems definitely aimed at retailers only. [You can see Mitsubishi at PMA in the YouTube clip below:]
Analysed from a marketing perspective, this EasyPhoto mini-dps product looks like it might occupy a price/proposition position somewhere between Kodak's Compact Kiosk GS and SONY's unique SnapLab product. Neither the Kodak Compact Kiosk nor the Mitsubishi EasyPhoto really comes close to encroaching on SnapLab territory, though. They're not the same proposition. What they do promise is a cost-per-print equally as low as that from a full-size photo kiosk, since they use full-size 6" printers.
One of the ways the Kodak Compact Kiosk GS is now being marketed is as an ID photography solution. And Mitsubishi is rejoining that race too. The roadmap for their EasyPhoto unit includes an optional upgrade to an Artificial Intelligence module that should enable the retailer to make passport-perfect ID photos from images captured on any digital camera. This should be coming down the Mitsubishi pipeline more-or-less now, and landing any time soon.
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• Mitsubishi Printers Get Vista Drivers! – Mitsubishi Electric have now released Vista drivers for their range of professional dye sub photo printers. There are drivers available for download for the CP9550DW, CP9800DW and CP3800DW. (Click the links to download the drivers.) 
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