New Fuji photo printing kiosks

In the old days (i.e. when we were still using 35mm film to take photographs), you had to go to the neighbourhood photo-processing store, hand over your 35mm film negatives and they’ll print them out for you.

While the excitement (and anxiety) of waiting for your prints to come back have diminished somewhat with the advent of digital photography, FujiFilm (Malaysia) Sdn Bhd hopes to inject some of the magic back into making trips to photo printing stores with its new Fujifilm Digital Kiosk (FDK) 7000 series photo processing kiosks.

Available now in Fujifilm Digital Imaging (FDi) stores across the country, the FDK 7000 allows users to make photographic prints from all sorts of digital media, be it Flash memory cards (such as CompactFlash, SD, xD and Memory Stick), customer-made CD-Rs and DVD-Rs, USB thumbdrives and even mobile phones (via Bluetooth).

Once your photos are loaded onto the kiosk, you’ll be able to choose between a wide variety of print and formatting options — apart from printing regular photos, you can add colourful borders, create photo montages, create pocket calendars and even invitation cards.

And if you need to back up your photos, you can burn them onto a CD-R or DVD-R through the kiosk’s optical drive.

The FDK 7000 comes in two variants: A special model with a built-in thermal dye-sublimation printer (the FDK 7000i) and a regular model without the printer.

The printer-equipped FDK 7000i is designed for making instant prints, taking only eight seconds to print a 4R photo.

However, these instant photos cost RM1 per print.

If you have time to spare, need to print a large number of photos or simply want to make prints in larger sizes (up to 12 x 18in), you can opt to print your pictures in the FDi station’s professional photo minilabs instead, with prices hovering between 40 and 60 sen per 4R print, depending on the number of prints.

This is made possible by the FDK 7000’s advanced networking capabilities, allowing several kiosks to be hooked up to the photo store’s colour lab.

The only kink in the FDK 7000’s armour is that it doesn’t have an automated billing/payment system — you’ll have to walk over to the counter and pay a cashier to get your prints (it’s because of this that the FDK 7000 kiosks are only available in authorised FDi stores).

If you’re still a little confused as to how it works, you can see the FDK 7000 in action at http://videos.thestar.com.my.

The FDK 7000 has been in service for the past two months.

FujiFilm Malaysia currently has 130 of these kiosks in the country and hopes to have up to 500 by March 2008.