The Cult of the Cool Mac: Made with 100% USDA real meat!

or the past several months, an attractive but lonely display has resided at the photo counter of my local CVS drug store. This bright yellow kiosk belongs to the Kodak Picture Maker print station which is advertised as "an ideal way for people to print pictures at retail from digital cameras or camera phones." I have never seen anyone use it.

I put it to the test this week after obtaining some coupons each valued at 5 free prints. Without the coupons, the prints cost just $.29 each — just about the same price that a 4x6 print costs from my inkjet. I went to two different CVS stores to see if the quality of both the product and service were the same.

To use one of these machines, you simply insert your "digital film" into the appropriate memory card slot on the front panel of the device, which appears to be an ordinary Pentium III class computer with a touch-screen display and running Windows 2000. You could also have it read your pictures from a CD ROM drive, but I did not try that. The software displays a very simple front-end with a clean and straightforward interface.

Once you have touched the appropriate button to select the location of your images (CD ROM or memory card), you will be taken to a selection-screen which allows you to preview your images, make simple adjustments for red-eye and color correction and choose the number of prints you want of each picture.

While the sparse flier for the service mentions prints of several sizes and special-order items such as mousepads and holiday cards, there were no obvious ways to choose such services from the kiosk. It appears that the machines are set up for 4x6 prints and no more.

The software is smart enough to identify which photos may cause problems due to low resolution source-images and it automatically rotates the images to fit a 4x6 print. At the same time, it fails to show which parts of the images may be cropped out.

I made 10 prints at each CVS store. Each time, I brought a mix of images both taken by my digital camera and from other sources but scaled to a 4x6 page. This allowed me to come across a significant limitation of the system almost immediately. While my digital camera is capable of making high-quality compressed TIF formatted images, the Kodak station cannot read them. JPEG images that were saved in an optimized format, that used progressive scan or that used the QuickTime compressor from PhotoShop or Graphic Converter were similarly not recognized. The station could only read the standard JPEG images and no more. I verified this limitation at the second CVS store, where I brought only JPEG images, but with several kinds of compression. Only the generic "Baseline Standard" JPEG images were recognized.

The selection process is a simple matter of touching the screen where it displays thumbnails of each of your images. (Note that the thumbnails are large enough for anyone to see over your shoulder, so this is not the best way to make prints from that night you got drunk at the nudist camp). After selecting which images were to be printed, I was given another screen for me to enter my name and the last 4 digits of my phone number. The machine loaded the photos onto the print queue on its hard drive — presenting a significant privacy hazard if the queue is recoverable. Then it allowed me to remove my memory card, printed two receipts and reset itself.

One receipt went to the photo-clerk and the other was for me. In addition, the clerk required me to fill out the form at the top of a film-dropoff packet as if I were leaving a roll of film or a disposable camera to be developed. This took several minutes each time because none of the clerks had any idea how the kiosk worked and had to consult with one another and with the store manager before taking my information.

The Kodak Picture Maker sent my image data to the photo-developing station behind the counter, where my pictures joined the queue along with the one-hour developing customers who were printing from film-negatives. The first time that I had the prints made, there was one customer ahead of me and it took about a half-hour to make the prints. Nobody was ahead of me the second time, yet it took almost two hours for the prints to be made because the printer entered a long automatic maintenance cycle just before it started my second print.

The results: Spectacular. These prints are made on photo paper and use a true photographic imaging system. Even low-resolution images print fantastically better than they do from any inkjet that I have ever seen. The pixels are not visible, even under a loupe. Details show up in these prints that don't appear in inkjet prints — even compared to 5760x1440 dpi prints from a 6-color Epson Stylus r300 on Epson's highest quality paper.

If a photo is really bad then it won't come out so well. A photo that was taken under poor lighting conditions printed with predictably washed-out colors and 640x480 images did appear a little fuzzy. Still, the photos looked far better than they did from an inkjet without significant time spent retouching in Photoshop before printing.

The persistent problem with these imaging stations is going to be the time that it takes to print. For most people, the long delay between selecting your images and receiving the prints will be a deal-breaker. It's much faster to just print the images out at home. At the same time, when you come across that stellar picture that deserves special treatment you will want to try the Kodak Picture Maker.

I can easily see myself looking for a CVS when I travel so that I can get quick gratification from my digital pictures both from my digital camera and perhaps from my camera-equipped cell phone. Future kiosks will supposedly have Bluetooth to cater to camera phone users. In such circumstances, the kiosks replace traditional one-day photo developers where a traveler might drop off yesterday's film before embarking on today's adventure, to pick up the prints at the end of the day. In fact, that will probably be my routine as I travel throughout the new year.

SUMMARY:
Pros: Simple and easy to use; Excellent photographic quality.
Cons: Lacks the quick gratification of printing to your own inkjet; Clerks are not knowledgeable; Only reads simple JPEG images; Potential privacy hazards.

[2003-12-08 22:30:05 This story has been edited by Dirty since its original posting...]