Screen quality was bright and clear, making it easy to select pictures to print from a preview.
In our experiments, the Kodak kiosks had by far the best user interface. Big W was using kiosks from once-giant German photographic maker Agfa, although that company's ongoing demise means Agfa kiosks will likely disappear or be renamed in the near future. Three of the outlets (Harvey Norman, Camera House and Jade) were using Fuji kiosks, while two (Kmart and Ted's) were running Kodak Picture Maker 5.0 software.
If you want convincing red-eye removal, use a program like Paint Shop Pro (which offers dozens of pupil colourings) to do the job properly before you head to the shops. Curiously, all of the kiosks we tested replaced the red pupils with a mid-tone grey that looked strangely abnormal during the editing process and just passable when printed. The only exception was the indoor happy-snap, in which we used the kiosk's red-eye removal feature to replace this extremely obvious picture flaw. Images were taken to each kiosk on a single SD card, then loaded and printed with default settings. Images included colour-soaked sunsets, sodium lamp-soaked pictures from the Australian Open, red-eye-ridden indoor happy snaps, full-sun beach shots, a commercial picture of an astronaut in space, and a green-heavy rainy-day picture. Barring Kmart's thermal prints, all shops offer discounts as you print more and more prints in a single job.Īt each store, we printed eleven digital images selected to give a wide range of tonality, colour and lighting. Regular prints at Camera House and Ted's were AU$0.49 each, Jade charges AU$0.60 each, and Kmart's instant thermal prints (more about these later) topped the charts at AU$0.59 each.
Prices ranged across the full spectrum, with Big W matching Harvey Norman's bargain-basement AU$0.15 per print offer.
We also visited our local professional printing shop, Jade Studio in suburban Mentone, to get a set of prints produced under the eye of an expert. IntroductionĬ recently visited five different photographic printing outlets at Melbourne's Westfield Southland shopping centre: Ted's Camera, Kmart, Big W, Southland Camera House, and Harvey Norman.
Most places offer prints at around AU$0.50 each, but heavy discounting and loss leading by some of the bigger electronics stores have brought sale prices down to around AU$0.15.Ĭustomers flock to such offers, but Harvey Norman recently learned the hard way that this kind of discounting has its downsides: stores were suffering from queues of up to 20m long, four-day turnaround and computers that simply crashed because they couldn't keep up with the load.Īt such low prices, logic would argue, surely something is lost? Do you really get what you pay for when it comes to printing at a photo kiosk? We hit the streets to find out. Not all printing services are equal, however, and some are downright horrible.