Opinion: If manufacturers would make printer supplies universal, digital photographers might be able to find what they need.Today's column is in defense of the "channel." Dealers who sell photographic supplies are not converting intelligently to the printer supplies business. They're a bit dumb, they need help.
But first, a public service announcement—I'll be making "stuff" a regular feature of this column, running notes about some software, educational materials and books that are too specialized to warrant much mention elsewhere, and a link or two.
The "stuff" goes at the end, and you can send comments or suggestions to me via my blog. Sooner or later, I guess the stuff will get its own ancillary column. Today's stuff is a book specifically dedicated to photographically beautifying women, a couple of pieces of software for color geeks, and a link to Photoshop optimization on the Mac. It's your choice: Skip ahead to the stuff, or stay right here for the soapbox.
Now, to get back to the soapbox, and channel issues: Have you noticed how hard it is getting to find ink-jet cartridges for prosumer photo-quality printers? Not only are the things expensive but the ones for your printer model are always out of stock, or a couple of colors seem to be missing. Because I've had problems getting them, I've started to stock some spare ink-jet cartridges.
Dye sublimation printer ribbons and the special paper that goes with them are also a headache. I have a Kodak 8500 dye sublimation printer sitting right here that prints 8x10. At least it should, but it doesn't. It doesn't because my dealer doesn't order the minimum amount of ribbon from Kodak, so he can't get any, so I don't get any. That's what he told me the last time I asked, back in February or March.
Sure, I could baldly state that my pro dealer is incompetent. But can a normal human really track all those incompatible supplies? Will a small dealer get decent prices on small orders? Can he still make a living? Wal-Mart makes its money with an omniscient data-mining system that tracks and predicts purchasing patterns, but smaller companies do not have such capabilities.
Noise reduction software can keep older cameras current. Click here to read Edmund Ronald's column.
My dealer is quite large and does stock the main pro printer supplies. However, a short survey here in Paris has convinced me that many smaller retailers are totally confused by the product jungle. Confusion translates into frustration. And then these dealers are adopting a harsh, passive-aggressive stance on digital photo printing systems and supplies: They ignore them.
Unfortunately, the digital supplies market is the only growth area for the dealers whose lab revenues and film sales are dwindling, so they're not doing themselves a favor by refusing to sell printer supplies. It's a dumb situation: The photo market has always been a high-margin industry with specialty dealers and high brand recognition. Now the manufacturers are setting conditions that overload and kill this very lucrative distribution channel.
Interestingly, the same small dealers who ignore the printer consumables are selling memory cards: The fungibility, limited number of distinctive formats, clear labeling, good margins, long stockability and the cost structure where capacity visibly translates into price enable even the most conservative analog film shop to stock some memory products.
Next Page: Manufacturers should give the channel a chance.
So, to be constructive in this column, I would like to say the following to the printer manufacturers: People are not printing their digital pictures. In the battle to get more product out there, the existing high-margin specialist-retailer channel is still your best ally. He's the guy who can convince people who don't like computers to give your product a chance. He's the place where you can test-market products to get them right for Wal-Mart.
One important thing that manufacturers can do to improve the dealer channel is to simplify the printer consumables product matrix. Make the models interoperable. The consumer is accustomed to any battery and film brand working in her camera, and any paper brand and ink cartridge should therefore work in any printer. At the very least this could be done for the next generation of small postcard-sized dye-sub machines.
It's time for the personal photo printer industry to be less short-sighted in maximizing today's profit, and a bit more mature. As Kodak proved with film for almost a century, a cash cow can be at the same time highly interoperable and highly profitable!
'Stuff'
OK, that was enough of a soapbox speech for today. Let's move on to the stuff. We have one tip on Photoshop, one retouching book and two pieces of color-geek software.
First and foremost, a hot link regarding the optimization of Photoshop CS2 on the Mac. Many of us have wondered, some aloud, if it's really worth upgrading to CS2. According to Barefeats.com, it turns out that in CS2, caching in conjunction with Tiger is substantially more effective than in CS, giving incredible 4x or 5x speedups on some operations with large (300MB) files. As a result, according to Barefeats, it's well worth investing in a large amount of RAM for a PowerMac; Tiger will use it to speed up your daily image processing considerably.
Second, here is a book on making beautiful women more beautiful. It's called "Photoshop CS: The Art of Photographing Women" by Kevin Ames. What I like about this book is that it uses both a photographer's insights and a retoucher's viewpoint to illuminate the subject matter. An amount of superficial retouching like smoothing out skin wrinkles is now routinely expected in everyday situations; this book demonstrates how to get it right.
Photoshop CS2 improves handling of images in Raw format. Click here to read Edmund Ronald's column.
However, much more brutal nipping and tucking are regularly practiced in commercial photography. Kevin Ames demonstrates things like how to sculpt legs, narrow waists or assemble a perfect composite shot from arms, legs and head in several takes. But he also shows you what to look out for when lighting and setting up the shots. I highly recommend it for anyone wanting to work in fashion or advertising photography, or is involved in retouching shots of models in a magazine.
Last, here are the promised two pieces of software for color geeks: Babelcolor and Spectrashop. Both of these packages can read in data directly from a Gretag eyeone spectrophotometer or import it from a file. They can also perform a wealth of conversions between color spaces, on any data that is supplied.
As the instrument can be operated in both emissive and reflected modes with both packages, the packages can be used for taking measurement samples of monitors, lighting devices and printed or painted materials. The documentation of Babelcolor is remarkably good and can serve as a good tutorial for color spaces and measurement. Spectrashop has an interesting and very powerful calculation facility that can operate on collections of spectral samples.
Both packages have demos; I suggest the interested reader download them. I shall try to come back to them for a nutshell review.
