SnapFish offers images on CD!
By
Mike Tomkins
(Wednesday, July 18, 2001 - 00:45 EDT)
Online photofinisher is first to offer users CD-ROMs of their digital images for purchase...
SnapFish.com Corp., the online photofinisher which launched at the start of 2000, has announced that it is now offering a new service which will allow customers without high-capacity storage options in their computer to safely store their images for posterity. Effective immediately, customers can purchase CDs of images in their albums, whether they originated as scans from film or as digital images from a digicam or the user's own scanner.
The service, which is to the best of our knowledge the first of its kind from an online photofinisher, costs $9.99 per CD with 50 photos included. Additional photos can be added at a cost of $3.99 per 25 photos, up to a maximum of 500 photos per CD. On top of this, an additional charge of $1.99 per order is required for shipping and handling, making the final cost per CD from $11.98 to a whopping $83.80 (24¢ per image for 50 images, coming down to 17¢ per image for a full CD of 500 images).
The service isn't very cost-effective, as the cost would very quickly add up to that of a CD-RW drive with which customers could record their own CDs, however it may prove useful to some customers who don't have the ability to add any kind of writeable CD drive or similar to their computer. Album CDs have been offered by online photofinishers in the past, but as far as we were aware these were limited-time offers allowing customers to retrieve their images before the sites switched to pay structures or closed down altogether.
One site, Club Photo, has announced plans to offer a similar service but has not yet made it available. Club Photo's cost is $7.95 for 60 images on an Album CD, or $49.95 for up to 10 CDs worth of storage on an Archive CD. (This would equate to 13¢ per image for an Album CD, or as low as 1¢ per image for archive CDs, assuming 10 CDs of 500 images each.) Obviously, these costs don't include shipping charges if there are any, but it is still likely that ClubPhoto's service would work out as better value than SnapFish's.
SnapFish also simultaneously announced free online image editing capabilities for its customers, for such things as removing redeye, cropping images, and correcting color and contrast. A number of other sites have offered such services for some time.
One thing that most sites don't offer which SnapFish now will is the ability to download full-resolution images which users can edit, print and archive themselves at home. The service is not free however - users must pay 89¢ per image for 1-5 images, 69¢ per image for 6-10, or ¢59 for 11 or more images. The site is offering one free downloaded image to let users try the service. Whilst expensive, this may be attractive to users who have mailed their film to SnapFish for processing, and whose only other alternative for getting high-res scans of their archived images is to purchase them on CD.
Source:
Yahoo! Finance / PR Newswire
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Original Source Press Release:
| Snapfish Launches Industry's First Customizable Photo CD-ROM, Image Editing, High-Resolution Downloads SAN FRANCISCO, July 12 /PRNewswire/ -- Snapfish, the complete online photo service for film and digital camera users, today announced a suite of new features including image editing, high-resolution downloads and the industry's first customizable Photo CD-ROM.
``Snapfish built the first complete, effective and affordable service for both film and digital camera users,'' Snapfish CEO and co-founder Raj Kapoor said. ``Snapfish is focused on developing the features our customers want and giving customers the power to enhance, store and share their images.''
The new features available at Snapfish include:
Image Editing
According to Lyra Research, approximately 75% of US digital camera users edit their pictures, but until now film customers had no convenient way to enhance and repair their images. For the first time all Snapfish customers can edit their photos online, fix common errors and improve their images before they order reprints. Quick and easy image editing tools developed in cooperation with Pixami, enable customers to fix redeye, crop their photos and automatically fix color and contrast problems. Image editing tools are free.
Custom Photo CD-ROM
Snapfish offers the industry's first Photo CD-ROM product that enables customers to archive high-resolution versions of their Snapfish images on CD-ROM, regardless of whether they originated from film or a digital camera. Customers simply create the Snapfish albums they want to save on CD-ROM, caption the photos, and place the order. Customers can now create subject-specific CD-ROMs like ``Baby's First Year'' or ``Back To School Photos, K-12'' and give them as gifts or use them for archiving. A new mailing address book stores mailing addresses for friends and relatives so customers can use the Snapfish Web site to ship CD-ROMs anywhere. Software included with the new CD-ROMs features a variety of image editing tools: redeye reduction, zoom, brightness, contrast, rotation and cropping, plus a slideshow feature.
Pricing on Custom Photo CD-ROM is $9.99 for the first 50 images and $3.99 for each additional 25 images. Capacity limits are 500 images or 500 MB, whichever comes first. Shipping is $1.99 per order.
High-Resolution Downloads
Snapfish customers frequently inquire about downloading high-resolution versions of their images from the Snapfish Web site to their computers. Snapfish now offers high-resolution downloads for editing, archiving and home printing. Downloading is quick and easy and the images are available right away. The resolution of the downloads for images from film is 1536x1024 pixels. Pricing is $.89 each for 1-5 images, $.69 each for 6-10 images and $.59 each for 11 or more. For a limited time Snapfish is offering one high-resolution image download per customer for free.
Snapfish -- http://www.snapfish.com -- develops, digitizes and prints photos from film cameras, digital cameras or single-use (disposable) cameras for less than it would cost at the drugstore. Snapfish offers film developing, a full set of prints on Kodak paper and password-protected online albums for just $1.99 per roll plus shipping and handling. Digital camera users get free uploads, storage and sharing and can order high-quality prints online.
Snapfish is based in San Francisco. Additional information and terms and conditions of Snapfish services are available at the company's Web site at http://www.snapfish.com . |
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