Frogprints photos hop online to take chore out of going digital

Friday 23rd February 2001

YOU SAY YOU WANT A RESOLUTION:
Grant Harvison (left) and Ryder Senior are tapping an unsatisfied market in New Zealand

By Stephen Ballantyne

Digital cameras are generally agreed to be a good idea - they may be expensive to buy but their running costs are low - and the LCD preview screens on most digital cameras encourage users to use them more freely than ordinary cameras. Editing pictures on the spot encourages even amateurs to shoot more.

Digital cameras have a few shortcomings though: you must have a computer to fully use their facilities, they don't have enough memory (although Iomega's portable Zip drive system can make up for that by backing up shots in the field), and it's a chore making prints from the pictures.

That last problem is actually a steep one - if you aren't willing to buy a photo-quality ink jet printer and output your pictures yourself (which can be very time-consuming for perfectionists), about the best you can do with a digital camera is watch the pictures on a computer monitor or a TV.

An obvious solution to the problem - obvious, that is, after someone else has done it - is to set up a service that allows digital photographs to be emailed to a processing lab, where they can be printed out and the prints mailed back to the photographer.

That'd be www.frogprints.co.nz, a New Zealand internet startup that sells something with easily understood value, that's useful to a large number of people and that capitalises on the inherent properties of the internet for much of its value. Is this a first?

Not really - people have been doing it in the US and Europe for a couple of years, but for some reason nobody had attempted such a thing here.

Grant Harvison, Frog Prints' managing director, was originally moved to try out the business model when he participated in a floating party on the Waitemata Harbour. The one person who had taken a camera along on the cruise was inundated with requests for prints. Mentioning it later to Ryder Senior, now Frogprints' marketing manager, they realised there was an unsatisfied market in New Zealand for an easy means of sharing pictures.

Some research on the internet uncovered about 20 US businesses running online photo-processing services but nothing similar in New Zealand.

The production end of the photography business often attracts tradesmen with inherently conservative ideas about their work but that isn't Frog Prints. "We had absolutely no experience with photo-finishing before this," Mr Senior said. "We're technologists - Grant worked at Unisys and I've worked on web-based systems for Brocker and others ...

"To move the whole idea of conventional developing and printing through to digital transmission and generate revenue from it seems to have been too much for the industry to comprehend - hence the slow response from the industry."

Not that there aren't potential pitfalls. Even in the US, online photo processing has seen mishandling, thanks to over-enthusiasm about the capabilities of the internet. "There were as many as 150 online processors in the US but now they're down to about seven," Mr Harvison said. "Companies were desperate to build online communities - they were giving away free prints to people who signed in with their email addresses, throwing away profits in a rush to grab customers. Those companies are gone now."

Mr Harvison said contacts in Britain have provided a better guide for Frog Prints, because of similarities in the patterns of photo usage here and in Britain.

"We've had some problems with the cameras not being easy enough to use - people have sent us pictures taken at 640 by 480 resolution because they didn't know their cameras were capable of anything else. They expect it to be point and click but it's not quite there yet."

Mr Senior noted many of Frog Prints' customers have both film and digital cameras: "They use the digital camera for emailing people pictures of their kids and the 35mm camera for making prints. That's a silly state of affairs that we're trying to cure - they should be able to get the same sort of service and price levels as they do from 35mm."

One of the most attractive features of the online photo-processing business (or alternatively, an early impediment to its growth) is that Frog Prints is staking a claim on technologies that aren't fully developed yet. The cameras are pretty good but they cost too much - a point-and-shoot digital camera capable of taking pictures of comparable quality to a $50 to $100 camera using 35mm film can cost 10 times as much.

And yet digital photography is enormously seductive - results are immediate, most digital cameras allow users to preview their pictures and edit them as they go, and once the initial outlay has been made the running costs are low (for users whose cameras have rechargeable batteries, that is - replaceable batteries can easily cost more than film in a conventional camera).

The other technology that needs to grow further is internet bandwidth - on a dialup modem it can take minutes to transmit digital photos with enough resolution to be suitable for printing. If the resolution of an image is below 100 pixels per inch (ppi) Frog will usually contact the person who sent the image in to warn them that the prints are likely to be disappointing.

Frog Prints gets excellent results at 300ppi, regardless of size. For an 8'' by 10'' print (20cm by 25cm) Frog's ideal file size is a 2400 by 3000 pixel image - over 20Mb of raw data in colour, but acceptably compressible to perhaps a megabyte or two depending on the content of the image. That's still a lot of data for users with dialup modems.

So that makes two technologies that need more development yet - increasing bandwidth and better, less expensive cameras. No doubt both will come along - digital subscriber lines are increasingly being sold to home users, and some extremely high-specification cameras have recently become available - at daunting prices.

"A key price point for us is a megapixel for $500," Mr Harvison said, a price-feature combination Agfa's CL15 and some other cameras were beginning to reach.

Central to Frog Prints' business is a hefty digital printer and processor from Fujifilm. Though small enough to fit in a single room, the machine has enough capacity to print about 10% of New Zealand's snaps. Unlike photo processing equipment of an earlier generation, it is largely self-monitoring - supply it with the chemicals and paper it needs, follow the maintenance schedules and it will turn out excellent quality prints just about as fast as you can feed in images.

Keeping the beast fed is a problem, though; until New Zealand photographers turn entirely digital Frog Prints stays in business by running a conventional photo-processing service.

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