by Simon Towler

The first decade of this century saw an extraordinary boom in on-site printing in UK event photography; so much so that the two activities became, for a few years, synonymous. The on-site printing boom may have been enabled by the new technology of digital photography and portable instant photo printers; but it was fuelled by the credit boom. Britain was going out, and Britain was spending money. And one breed of photographer was going to have some of that.

“The gold rush is over, the dust has settled, the present market isn’t difficult to research. On-site printing hasn’t died. It’s just returned, more or less, to its pre-boom state.”

Revellers got used to the idea of stepping onto a photographer’s seamless on a night out, and buying a print. The numbers of these photographers kept growing, and they were raking in cash.

Then came the crunch, and recession. And many of them disappeared.

Or did they? During the boom, no one was able to estimate how many had got into this new kind of event photography, or how big the booming market was. But now the gold rush is over, the dust has settled, the present market isn’t difficult to research.

On-site printing hasn’t died. It’s just returned, more or less, to its pre-boom state. Before the boom, the on-site printers were the equestrian photographers, travelling to horse shows, and the dog agility people. Those people are still doing on-site printing today (and with much better printers). But for others, much has changed.

The Entrepreneurs

During the boom, there were entrepreneurial individuals who established on-site printing companies that grew a lot bigger than others. They either had lucrative ongoing contracts with big nationwide events, or they had more complex business models like franchising, or ‘events-as-corporate-marketing’; or they had superior sales and marketing, that could keep several crews supplied with work.

The photographers who owned those businesses earned individual annual incomes ranging from about £40-60k, right up to six figure sums, on turnovers that in some cases were in the millions. And they’re still around. Most of those people are still in event photography today — though some have survived business failures and, with the exception of a few really very big players, most now trade from home.

The Jobbers

Those entrepreneurs still provide — mostly casual — work, to what we now think of as an events-only photographer: one of the 200 or so jobbing individuals equipped to do on-site printing. They plug into networks for buying subbed jobs, or take second-shooter assignments. They don’t earn a lot of money — it’s not unusual for them to be offered as little as £50 a day, just a top-up on top of a day-job — and they keep a low profile. (The day-job and the need for a low profile may be two of the things that prevent them from trading in their own right.) They’re pretty anonymous, often known only by a trading-name and mobile phone number listed on some basic website.

Today’s Event Photographer

But those guys make up less than a fifth of the photographers who do events. Although the wholly independent, events-only, on-site printers — who earned comfortable livings trading as eventers in the past — mostly withdrew from the market, their place was taken by other social photographers — mostly wedding photographers — who could get event work, but didn’t depend exclusively on it, nor on the on-site printing model.

“Today, most referrals for on-site printing actually come from other photographers.”

Today, most referrals for on-site printing actually come from these other photographers, many of whom choose to hire an on-site printing crew for events that require it, rather than provide the service themselves.

There are about 700 of these businesses active in event photography today. Events are a significant portion of their income, but they typically have at least two other primary revenue streams: wedding and portrait work, and schools and prom photography. They get their own jobs in their own right, and represent roughly three quarters of the market. For all intents and purposes, they ARE the event photography market today.

The Revenue Model

On-site printing was the supreme revenue model in event photography during the boom years: the idea was to sell prints like hotcakes, there and then for cash. Many event photographers even paid for the privilege of attending an event, just to have the opportunity to sell prints on-site.

Hopefully, no one pays for it today. On the contrary, charging to attend has become an important part of the mix. On many jobs, an attendence fee is the main revenue. On-site printing is not regarded as an automatic necessity either. Unless an eventer knows a particular job of old, it can be hard to predict whether most of the per-photo revenue will come from prints on-site, or from web sales afterwards — or indeed if prints will be any substantial component of the revenue at all. The days of the event photographer obsessed with the performance minutiae of their dye sub printers are numbered, if not over. More than one major manufacturer has had to withdraw from the market for these printing machines completely.

The Digital Challenge

It would be untrue to say that event photography has struggled with the digital-sales challenge. The truth is, it has largely failed to struggle with, or even address, that challenge. For customers at an event, an image that can be instantly shared over the mobile phone network onto Facebook and Twitter often has more value than a print — no matter how professionally taken, against whatever novelty background. Event photography lacks technological solutions and revenue models for mobile phone and social network sales. It’s still wrestling with web sales, and experimenting with the blind alley of selling images on disc and USB stick.

Moving Into Proms

One of the most positive and progressive developments in event photography has been the general move into school prom work that has accompanied the growth in the UK of the whole school prom phenomenon. This dove-tails very well with the skill set of today’s event photographer, who frequently does schools work, as well as events, weddings and portraits. They’re the kind of schools photographer who operates locally on a small scale, often doing their own schools printing on — you guessed it — dye-sub printers; and it isn’t difficult for them to add prom photography to this mix. In fact, it’s a natural progression. Local wedding and portrait photographers have the trade qualifications and respectability necessary for schools work, something the more anonymous events-only photographers lack.

Conclusion

So, on-site printing hasn’t died. It has only reverted to it’s pre-boom state. It’s still practiced, as before, by the equestrian and dog agility photographers. And the most successful exponents in other markets haven’t experienced much decline in their business either. Top event photographers will still tell you honestly that, for them, on-site printing is still quite healthy. They’re largely unaware of the difficulties lesser mortals are experiencing. But the supremacy of on-site printing as a revenue model has waned, and event photography has reverted to a more traditional mix of ways of making money. All but the most successful events-only photographers have largely disappeared, their places taken by the wedding and portrait photographers who also do schools and events. For photographers, school proms have become one of the most important categories of event.

They think it’s all over? Well it isn’t quite, yet.

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.

A dry lab is a minilab-class inkjet or dye sub photo printer. Minilab-class machines have an essential role as the main print engine at the heart of most retail photo centres. They used to use exclusively liquid chemical processes, with the advantage of a very low cost-per-print. But changes in costs, and in the environment for business, mean that dry processes will be more economical for many sites now.

“The economics of retail photo printing have moved around. Print volumes have declined, costs have gone up. New minilabs are needed that are economical at lower volumes.”

The economics of retail photo printing have moved around. Print volumes have declined, while the costs of consumables, energy, floor space and environmental and health and safety regulations have all gone up. New minilabs are needed that are economical at lower volumes. They need to be virtually zero-consumption while idle. They need to take up less space, and they mustn’t require plumbing or special power supplies. They need to be dry.

Dry labs are being sold to new sites. Photo-Me, for one, are targeting them.

“With our DKS 910 and 920 systems we’re interested in expanding the market to sites that wouldn’t have enough volume to justify a wet process photo lab,” Photo-Me marketing manager, Francois Alves De Freitas, said. “This includes community pharmacies, independent retailers and photographers’ studios. We want to give them a chance to have a slice of the photo gift pie.”

But many dry labs are sold to existing photo centres, through the natural cycle of replacing old equipment. Despite the recession, this cycle may have accelerated a little. Here’s why:

The problem with the old chemical labs at many lower-volume sites is that they aren’t paying their way any more. They can’t. They’re making fewer prints on dearer paper, and wasting power keeping their chemistry warm, while it goes off as they idle. They can’t cover their increased fixed costs, and are no longer earning their floor space. Replacing them with machines that have a higher marginal cost-per-print actually makes more sense, as long as the replacements are smaller, less wasteful, save labour, and slash fixed costs.

“We’ve saved a lot of money by going APEX,” Keith Hall of Dartmoor Photographic says, referring to his move to dry lab. “We’ve lowered our electricity bill by quite an amount, and saved about forty hours labour a week. Our shop used to have to open an hour early in the mornings, just to set the old R1 up for the day!”

CHOOSING A SOLUTION

The requirements of each photo centre are unique. They are uniquely understood only by its owner/manager. There isn’t a one-size-fits-all dry lab solution that can be applied to every site. The individual retailer will chose their ideal solution from the wide ranges offered by manufacturers.

“Unless the customer’s volume dictates just one choice, it’s the people that are buying who need to make the decision,” Paul Austin, marketing executive at Fujifilm says. “If their requirement is to do 12 x 24 inch prints for the wedding album market, or 2000 prints an hour, our only answer is the Frontier 770 wet lab. But if they only do 1000 prints a day, and it’s fairly steady, 100 to 200 prints most hours, and they don’t need many 12 inch prints, then we show them the wet lab and the Frontier DL410 dry minilab together. They make the choice.“

Buyers won’t make that choice based solely on which model of dry lab though. They’ll assess the overall retail photo system it’s part of, the manufacturer’s whole proposition. Some selling points of the solution as a whole will be critical to the retailer’s choice of lab.

“The key thing with the Kodak APEX dry lab,” Chris Castle, hardware sales manager at Tetenal, says, “is its versatility in combination with the Kodak G4 kiosks. You can produce a multitude of products from it: photobooks, greetings cards, invitation cards, calendars, etc.”

And Rohit de Souza, HP’s vice president of retail publishing, says that what their dry lab based solution offered to Tesco Extra’s customers was an unparalleled choice of printable assets. “Customers could quickly and easily create customized photo projects,” he said.

Ultimately, though, given certain other factors, purchase decisions will tend to resolve to issues of cost effectiveness. That is, cost effectiveness, given print quality, productivity, reliability, ease of operation, and versatility.

Tesco’s commercial hard-lines director, Graham Harris, said they chose HP (and the Photosmart ML1000 inkjet dry minilab) “for the reliability of its photo centre and its quality of output, which match the high levels of service we guarantee to our customers.”

INKJET OR DYE SUB?

One of the choices buyers will make will be between print technologies. There are visible differences between the image characteristics of dye sub and inkjet dry lab photographs, but both types have equal consumer acceptance.

“Our quality dry photo paper isn’t just like a traditional photograph,” Fujifilm’s Paul Austin says, “it is a photograph. People that put them next to traditional C-type prints can’t tell the difference.”

Noritsu’s marketing executive, Alison Hughes, agrees. “The kind of pictures you’re going to get produced in our shops are going to be far higher quality than those you can get at home,” she says. Her organization’s own D700 series printers are also used for the Fujifilm dry minilabs. “But Noritsu and Fujifilm are two independent companies,” she explains, “We compete against each other for business, as many customers can testify.”

Kodak can claim proven consumer acceptance of the dye sub media they use in their APEX system. “Kodak chose thermal because it’s a proven, stable technology,” Chris Castle from Tetenal says. “It’s used in the 90,000 Kodak instant print kiosks producing photographs all around the world. And it gives a cost-per-print on 4 x 6 inch photos of just six pence each.”

The market for dye sub media is mature, and the costs are known. Photo-Me say it costs four to five times more than traditional photo paper. The market for inkjet dry lab media, on the other hand, is relatively young. It’s arguable prices have yet to find their level. “Many people expect dry prices to fall,” Photo-Me say, “but production and distribution costs are always likely to give real photo paper the cost advantage.”

Keith Hall, lab owner at Dartmoor Photographic, points out a unique advantage of dye sub dry labs: a typical configuration includes a pair of redundant six inch printers. “When one of the printers in my APEX goes down,” he says, “I just keep on going on the other one, till Kodak send me a replacement. I’m never down.“

ARE DRY LABS GOOD MINILABS?

Hardware prices and feature sets for dry labs may not be mature. Manufacturers like DNP, Fujifilm, Kodak, Noritsu, Photo-Me, San Marco and even Mitsubishi all have stakes in RA4 wet chemistry printing. Those with really big stakes might be slightly inhibited about driving dry technology forward too quickly — especially traditional lab builders.

But all the inkjet dry labs do have an industrial design that could be read as suggesting a lineage from traditional minilabs. (They look like minilabs.) They typically have backprinting and job-sorter options too, suiting them to one-hour-photo workflow.

Kodak’s dye sub APEX system competes directly against the inkjets. It’s also clearly capable as a wet lab substitute.

APEX and the inkjet dry labs are the machines that encroach the furthest on wet lab territory. The latest software for APEX has focussed on increasing its functionality, adding more minilab-like features. Back-printing (or clear front-printing) is on its roadmap, due later this year.

APEX is based primarily on the Kodak 7000 series printers. This hardware is exclusive to Kodak. They’re not the most compact units, but they do produce all the commonest retail sizes from a single standard Kodak media kit.

Fujifilm and Noritsu dry minilabs are also becoming increasingly capable. The new Frontier DL430 and Noritsu D703 models offer dual-roll capability, allowing different media widths or surfaces to be loaded simultaneously, and introduce cassette loading.

THE OUTLOOK

What does the future hold?

An 1100 prints per hour Frontier dry minilab is on the roadmap for next year, and no one doubts that a twelve inch unit must start to loom on the horizon eventually.

And Mitsubishi Electric will join the fray within months. The corporation’s highly regarded dye sub printers will be housed in pairs in a new MPU mass production unit. They’re calling it The Tower. It will have a belt sorter transporting orders vertically to an output location on top, and standard two-line forty-character back-printing. Coupled with a Mitsubishi Click touch-screen, it should become yet another capable dry lab.

As someone has said, the outlook is dry.

Fujifilm ASK2000 - a fast event printer

Which Printer for Event Photography?
by Simon Towler

Event photography has evolved from being just another way to earn some money, into a whole contemporary subculture. Instant photo printing is the technology that has enabled modern event photography. The printers used in eventing today are a class of machine known as “Fast Event Printers”. A fast event printer is a dye-sub unit that takes a roll of media 6″ inches wide and produces its maximum-size print in less than 20 seconds. These machines are about as closely related to the small dye-sub photo printers used at home as main battle tanks are to the mini metro. This month I tested seven of them for NewPhotoDigest, giving some thought to how you might choose between them. This is what I found.

Current models of fast event printer include the Copal DPB6000, Fujifilm ASK2000, ICI ImageData OP1000, Kodak 6850, Mitsubishi CP9800DW, and Sony UP-DR200.

PRINT QUALITY

I’m going to stick my neck out in this review, and suggest that print quality is not an important factor. All of the photo printers on test here are capable of producing photo quality your customers at any event will be perfectly satisfied with. There’s not much to choose between them, and the choices would be personal and highly subjective. A photographer’s eye will clearly see differences, but their customer’s won’t. The Sony UP-DR200 though, does deserve a special mention for its paper-based media and its ability to produce matte prints from the same roll as gloss.

PRINT SPEED

Event photographers are obsessed with speed. They need to make every sale they can in as little time as possible. If you’ve got, for example, 700 people at an event, and just a 90 minute window to offer them prints, then your maximum revenue possibility is to make and sell 700 prints in 90 minutes. Every second counts. The speed of your printers is not the only factor here. Arguably it’s not even the most important factor. But it is something eventers focus on.

All the printers on review here are fast. That’s the class they’re in. It proved very difficult to make speed comparisons between them. However, I did find that the manufacturer rated speeds were reliable, at least as a comparitive measure. In the real world, average times per print are very different when producing multiple different images, and it’s problematic to isolate all the factors in this.

The Sony UP-DR200, though, does take the laurels as the fastest event printer on test, although the ICI Olmec OP1000 and Kodak 6850 weren’t too far behind. If there’s one printer that could be faster, it’s the Mitsubishi CP-9800DW, but it partly makes up for that with its ability to maintain average print speeds over long runs.

MAXIMUM PRINT SIZE

These machines divide into two categories of maximum print size: 6″x8″ inches or 6″x9″ inches. All event photographers in the UK can agree that one of these sizes is the optimum for eventing – but not which one! The Sony and the Kodak are 6″x8″ machines, producing standard 6R photo sizes. These, their users say, are easy to find mounts and frames for. The other printers go up to 6″x9″, which matches the aspect ratio of digital camera images. Event photographers that use these say they can print 6″x9″ images straight away, without having to waste extra seconds editing the crop.

The debate as to which is the better size for events is an irreconcilable schism. Choose your preferred print size before you choose your printer! (6″x9″ users will tell you their printers can do 6″x8″ too. But the 6″x8″ folk say this is a cheat, and uses 9″ inches of ribbon anyway!)

OTHER PRINT SIZES

UK photographers claim they can charge more for 6″ inch prints.

Interestingly, in the States 5″x7″ is a common size for event photos – photographers there offer 6″ inch prints as an up-sell. If you want to sell 5″x7″ in the UK, all these machines will do it (although they may need spacers), except the Kodak 6850, which requires a special irreversible conversion to 5″x7″, and then can’t do 6″x8″ prints.

DRIVER COMPATIBILITY

None of these printers can print by themselves, you need to attach a computer for that. Compatibility needs to be checked. They all ship with drivers for Windows XP, but how about support for Vista and the Apple Mac? (A lot of event photographers use MacBooks, or laptops with Vista.)

All the manufacturers featured here now have their own Vista drivers available for these printers. If they’re not in the box with the printer, your dealer may write them to CD for you, or you can download them from the Web. Mac drivers are also available for all of them, except for the Kodak 6850 and the ICI ImageData Olmec OP1000. (However, the OP1000 is the only one of this current crop to already have a fast direct driver in ExpressDigital Darkroom, the workflow software used by many eventers.)

In summary, if you absolutely have to print from a Mac, avoid the ICI and Kodak machines. If you’re an ExpressDigital user and need to pare every precious second off your print times, consider the ICI Olmec OP1000.

PHYSICAL SPECIFICATIONS

Having dealt with print size and compatibility, we now examined our test machines for another important set of properties: weight, dimensions and ergonomics.

It’s in the nature of event photography that you will have to manhandle your printers around – into the gig and back again. That’s one of the reasons why eventers use as few printers as they can get away with (just one, if possible). It’s also the reason most of them avoid excessively heavy units.

When it comes to weight, fast event printers fall into two broad categories – heavy weights and lighter machines. Heavy weights weigh 25Kg+ unloaded, while the lighter machines weigh significantly less – around 20Kg at most. The market for event printers favours the lighter machines.

Three machines here are heavy-weights: the Copal DPB6000, the physically identical Fujifilm ASK2000, and the Kodak 6850. They all weigh 25Kg. (Kodak do have a lighter machine, the 605, but not in this class.)

Of the lighter machines, the Sony UP-DR200 wins the laurels for lightest of the bunch at 17Kg, while the Mitsubishi CP9800DW is not far behind at 21Kg. The ICI Olmec OP1000 is a 44-pounder, a perfectly manageable 20Kg. If weight is a crucial factor for you, choose one of these three lighter machines. They’re built just as well as their heavier brethren.

If weight is important because you’re going to lift the machine, then ergonomics come into play here too. The dimensions need to be grabbable, and there need to be plenty of grab points built into the housing of the printer. Any assessment of this must be a bit subjective, but having handled them all my personal opinion is that they rank in ergonomics exactly as they do in weight, with the Mitsubishi and Sony being the most carry-friendly, the ICI machine holding the middle ground, and the heavy-weights coming in later.

PRICE, WARRANTY AND SUPPORT

The prices of these machines, the amount of media included with them, and the warranty periods offered for them, vary so much over time as to make comparisons difficult. It’s a constantly moving target. So instead of looking at what you get for your money, let’s consider what backs it up.

Fast event printers are mission-critical equipment – when they’re down, the eventer’s business is interupted, and he’s losing money. So what’s support like in the UK for these machines, if you need a warranty repair, out-of-warranty repair, or just help, assessment and advice?

It’s difficult to assess objectively. In my experience, though, Fujifilm have shown an edge in the levels of backup they provide for their machines. Help is provided by their Photofinishing Help Desk in Bedford, where their own engineers are also based. Bedford has been known to be quite proactive in resolving customer issues with individual ASK 2000s. And this is one of the main things that distinguishes the ASK2000 from the hardware-identical Copal DPB6000. First-line support in the UK for the DPB6000 is provided by the dealer who imports it.

ICI Olmec are also UK based, and have always had the confidence to offer a standard two-year warranty with their OP1000 PrintBox, which is anyway a legendarily reliable machine.

The Kodak support process always moves inexorably toward resolution of any issues with individual printers, but the price of their spare parts can be eye-wateringly prohibitive.

Sony offer a well-thought-out PrimeSupport package, mediated in the UK through dealers and third-party engineers.

Mitsubishi also offer a professional-level warranty with good backup, ultimately from their own engineers(if necessary).

CONCLUSION

The seven printers on test here represent a fair selection of the fast event printers currently available in the UK. They are all excellent machines, well designed, well built, high performance, high quality and great value for money. Each of them has some unique selling point that will make you as an individual choose it rather than any other. Whichever one you choose, you won’t regret it. Happy eventing!