Twenty three eastern Massachusetts photo processing retailers are using LifePics' technology that enables camera phone users to transmit photos to a Web site that, in turn, enables the photos to be printed and picked up a local retailer, according to an article in the Boston Globe.
LifePics began offering camera phone photo printing capabilities to their photo processing system in February 2005, the company's press release says.
The article is a nice introduction to printing via camera phones, but there's one source quoted that caught my attention. Here it is:
"Some industry executives are skeptical cellphone prints will ever prove to be any serious rival to prints made from film or high-resolution digital cameras. 'We don't expect this kind of service to prove very popular,' said Carolina Milanesi, a Gartner Inc. analyst.
"Even with the 1.3 megapixel cameras now available, she said, 'the picture quality won't satisfy most people.'"
Oh yeah?
Assuming Milanesi was quoted correctly, she had better spend more time looking at one megapixel (and above) camera phone photos. Certainly many camera phone in the United States do not produce high quality images and aren't suitable for printing.
But just as certainly there are some VGA and one megapixel camera phones in the U.S. that product images that are just fine for 4" x 6" prints. And that's based on what's available in the U.S. today.
Two megapixel prints from camera phones available in Japan produce excellent images. Just ask the consultants at Future Image who have compared camera phone photos with single-use cameras and SLR prints.
Comments