Schools photographer Jenny Barnard of South Cheshire Studios has applied Fujifilm ASK thermal photo printers to nursery printing, to help them produce affordable packages at good margin

South Cheshire Studios prints schools work on Fujifilm ASK printers
written by Simon Towler

Schools photographers South Cheshire Studios have applied Fujifilm ASK thermal photo printers to nursery printing, to help them produce affordable packages at good margin

South Cheshire Studios is a small schools photography business owned and managed by Jenny Barnard. When faced with the challenge of pricing nursery packages affordably for lower-income parents, while at the same time still making a profit on them, Jenny decided to bring printing in-house. She cooked up an innovative solution based on affordable Fujifilm ASK professional thermal photo printers.

Evolving a requirement

South Cheshire Studios is a relatively young schools photography business. It started its first season in September 2008. Owner Jenny Barnard LBIPP specialised in nursery and primary school photography. She wanted to extend her service into some of the less-advantaged communities within South Cheshire’s catchment area, but couldn’t see how she could price her packages affordably for those parents and still make money from them, given the out-lab costs charged by her schools printers.

“We use a proof-card system to get orders from our clients. The thing that enabled us to apply the Fujifilm ASK printers to our work was the availability of workflow software that links very well to the Fujifilm printers and allows us to make proof-cards for every single child at the touch of a button.”

Jenny said: “We worked in some areas that didn’t have as much money, and we wanted to provide a service to them that they could afford so they could have photographs of their children. But the prices that we were being quoted from our schools labs meant there would have been no profit margin in that for us. So we needed to have a look around to see if we could find a way to make prints ourselves, to cut our costs in order to pass the benefit on to our clients.”

South Cheshire Studios did consider buying its own minilab. But Jenny did the math and realised that, as a small business serving fewer than fifty schools, South Cheshire wasn’t going to have enough volume for a minilab to be economical.

She said: “Because we’re a small company – we deal with about forty to fifty primary schools and nurseries – we didn’t have the through-put to make a minilab cost effective. Our nurseries only have about 30 to 100 children each, and our primary schools don’t have more than 300.”

Luckily, a chance remark from one of South Cheshire Studio’s suppliers, mentioning a family of printers from Fujifilm called the ASKs, led Jenny to the Focus on Imaging show in 2009 to seek them out as a possible alternative.

Finding a solution

Jenny and a colleague saw the Fujifilm ASK 2000 and ASK 4000 printers on the Fujifilm stand at Focus on Imaging 2009.

She said: “We were really impressed with them. We wanted to go with the Fujifilm brand rather than any other, and we thought that what they offered was just as good if not better than their competitors. We were very pleased with them. For nursery school photography, where today’s parents are buying a pack of pictures for just £10 and might only keep them for six months, the Fujifilm ASKs were perfect.”

The Fujifilm ASK 2000 is a professional photo printer that uses a dry thermal dye sublimation process to produce 300 x 600 dpi continuous tone images on rolls of water-proof, tear-resistant Fujifilm photo media up to 6 inches wide, at speeds of just 8 seconds per 6 x 4 inch print or less than 20 seconds per 6 x 8 inch print.

Its bigger brother, the Fujifilm ASK 4000, uses the same proven technology in a larger format, producing 8 x 10 inch or 8 x12 inch photos at a speed of up to 40 seconds (per 8 x 10 inch print).

Both printers cut their output into individual prints automatically.

These machines would require a far lower capital investment than a minilab, making it easier to recover the investment over a smaller volume of prints.

Refining the solution: workflow

By themselves though, the ASK printers did not represent a schools printing solution. Jenny needed to find software that would enable her to print her proof cards, a crucial task in schools workflow, on the Fujifilm machines.

She didn’t have any problem finding workflow software compatible with the Fujifilm ASKs. She stumbled across some straight away at the same Focus on Imaging show. The Fujifilm brand tends to be widely supported by software developers creating programs for professional photo applications.

Jenny said: “We use a proof-card system to get orders from our clients. The thing that enabled us to apply the Fujifilm ASK printers to our work was the availability of workflow software that links very well to the Fujifilm printers and allows us to make proof-cards for every single child at the touch of a button.”

South Cheshire Studios’ workflow now includes using this software to automatically generate proof-cards with the children’s images on them, printing them on a Fujifilm ASK 2000. Parents choose the images they want and mark their orders on the cards. South Cheshire then prints the orders.

The Studios bought two of the 6 inch Fujifilm ASK 2000s, and one 8 inch ASK 4000. It configured the three printers so that one of the ASK 2000s prints 6 x 4 inch photos on 4R roll media, the other does 6 x 8 inch prints on 6R rolls, and the ASK 4000 is used for 10 x 8 inch prints. The 6 x 4 inch printer also outputs 2 x 3 inch and 2 x 1.5 inch prints for South Cheshire’s standard packs.

This configuration allows South Cheshire Studios to print its proof cards and all its packs entirely in-house on the Fujifilm ASKs. Packs are generated and printed automatically by the workflow software, according to what’s ordered. For instance, the Studio’s pack “A” consists of two 10 x 8 inch prints, two 8 x 6 inch prints, two 6 x 4 inch prints and some little prints.

Perfecting the solution: colour management

But a configuration of printers and workflow software by itself was still not a complete solution. If South Cheshire Studios were to produce all the different size prints in its packs from three different printers, the printers would need to be colour-calibrated to produce identical output. Out of the box, no printer produces output identical to another, not even another one of the same model printing on the same media.

Luckily, Fujifilm has a headquarters in the UK, in Bedford, with all the technical expertise to assemble and integrate functioning solutions built on Fujifilm products. Fujifilm’s technical support manager, Leyton Prosser, understood straight away that South Cheshire Studios needed special software colour profiles for their ASKs to make the printers produce perfectly colour-matched output. Within a week he had created and installed these profiles, and even posted them on the Fujifilm website for other ASK users to take advantage of.

Benefits and trade-offs

In-house printing has allowed South Cheshire Studios to be more flexible in its workflow. When the business was doing all its schools printing with out-labs it was imperative for it to shoot in the morning and do post-production the same afternoon, so it could order its proof cards from the lab straight away. This was because it could take a week to get the cards back. Now it can just put everything into the workflow software, and have proof cards coming out of the Fujifilm ASKs ten minutes later.

One of the trade-offs a business makes when it chooses a lower capital investment printer like a thermal dye-sub, rather than a traditional wet lab, is that it’s marginal cost-per-print is typically higher. But this is less of an issue for a schools photography business than it might be for a photo lab, because the schools photographer sells packs, not individual prints.

Jenny says: “The cost-per-print of Fujifilm media for their ASK printers is very good, they’re very cost effective. For example, a 6 x 4 inch print costs us about 7p. We don’t sell individual prints, we sell them as part of packs, so our mark-up is quite satisfactory.”

Bringing so much of its schools printing in-house has also slashed South Cheshire Studio’s out-lab costs.

Keeping it Fujifilm

South Cheshire Studios also does enlargements up to A2 size on an Epson inkjet printer with Fujifilm Professional inkjet media. Jenny says: “I’ve always found Fujifilm inkjet media to be very high quality and cost-effective. I have a fine-art background, I’m quite a tactile person, and I like the feel of the prints.”

She continues: “I have a number of contacts at Fujifilm and I know them quite well. We’ve had an awful lot of advice and support and encouragement from them. At the Focus show they’re always really helpful, brilliant. They’re always available on the end of the phone. I don’t see any reason to go to anyone else.”

Fujifilm solutions

As a case-study, South Cheshire Studios illustrates how Fujifilm UK has the expertise and resources, and the willingness, to design and implement bespoke professional imaging solutions based on Fujifilm products and services, and to integrate them with products from other sources, to the requirements of its customers, no matter what their business size or how individual their requirement. For the imaging professional, Fujifilm is the natural partner.

To ask about Fujifilm professional photo imaging solutions in the UK, including Fujifilm ASK professional thermal photo printers, e-mail minilabs@fuji.co.uk or call Paul Austin, marketing executive, on +44 (0)1234 217 724 today.