With the rapid level of change in photography one question that is now coming up is have we reached the end of the road for photographic printing? We are seeing real changes in the way we handle photographic images with the switch to digital working. The major suppliers of photographic films and papers are seeing demand dropping more rapidly than predicted a few years ago. Companies like Kodak are shutting down plants making photographic papers and film throughout the world. The way consumers are now handling digital photographic images is very different to the manner in which they handled analog photographic images. Only a small percentages of images taken digitally are ever printed. A large proportion of those images that are printed are printed using desktop ink jet technology rather than photographic paper.

It is only those images taken to drug stores, supermarkets, photographic shops, etc. that may be printed photographically using digital mini labs. These mini labs come from a number of suppliers including Agfa, Fujifilm, Konica Minolta and Noritsu and up to now have mainly used digital imaging to produce prints on photographic paper. Such mini labs can be operated directly from digital media readers on the machine or via linked customer operated kiosks. There are also solutions using the Internet to download images to be printed at large scale mini lab operations. In addition to these mini lab photo-printing systems there are separate kiosk based systems where printing is by other technologies such as thermal printing using predominantly Mitsubishi or Sony dye sublimation printers.

What is really interesting however is to see how other technologies are now becoming increasingly important for printing of digital images and where traditional photographic papers have no part in these solutions. These technologies are different forms of digital printing. I have already mentioned the huge number of desktop inkjet photo printers that are being supplied by companies like Canon, Epson, HP and Lexmark where printing is on specialty inkjet paper for photo printing operations. However not everyone, including myself, want to use such inkjet printers for printing photo images for many reasons. We still want to use an external specialty service that can print the photographic images in a high quality and a variety of formats. In this we are seeing changes taking place in the technologies being used for such printing.