Wal-Mart's New Photo Printing Service Undercuts Apple, Others
Wal-Mart's New Photo Printing Service Undercuts Apple, Others
by , 2:25 PM EDT, September 27th, 2005
Wal-Mart has fired a new salvo in the digital photo printing war, dropping the price of prints at its store to US$0.15 each, with members of its Sam's Club stores paying $0.13 per image. An article at The Wall Street Journal (subscription required to view) notes that the service, which turns around jobs in 48 hours, is a new low point for digital photo printing costs at retail.
In the online realm, Apple charges $0.19 per print through iPhoto, which uses Kodak for processing. Kodak's own Kodak Gallery unit charges $0.15 per image, a new price that was adopted last Thursday. Hewlett-Packard's Snapfish unit charges $0.12 per print, with an extra nickel per image to mail them to a customer's home. There are also bargain outlets, such as PhotoCheap.biz's $0.108 per print, plus $0.99 per order for shipping and handling, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Wal-Mart and Sam's Club both offer one-hour photo printing at $0.19 and $0.17 per image, respectively, with the latter charging the same as rival Costco. According to The Wall Street Journal, printing images at home costs roughly $0.24 per shot for the paper and ink.
Observer Comments
... as it uses top-of-the-line Fuji machines with Fuji Crystal paper. You can even go to some website, don't remember it offhand, and download the color profile of the machine in your local WalMart or SamsClub. Use that profile in Photoshop to tweak the color just right, and you're set to go.
as of this posting here are the prices for sam's. pickup is usually about 2 hours at my store, quality is the same as any vendor using the high quality fuji processors. their upload site works fine with macs but is a tiny bit tricky the first time you use it. enjoy
Individual Prints
Size Mail Order Price 1 Hour Price 2-3 Day Price
4 x 6 $0.11 $0.17 $0.14
5 x 7 $0.56 $0.38 $0.56
8 x 10 $1.58 $1.46 $1.58
Wallets (2) $0.28 $0.36 $0.28
Wife has used Sams on a couple of occasions and the quality has been fine. Cold, but that's to be expected with Fuji. I had both Fuji and Xerox at work and prefered Xerox Laserprints to Fuji Dye-sub prints. Put identical 8x10s in a frame and stand back and view from a normal distance. You can't see any qualitative differances between the two. Cost savings though are tremendous.
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