Back in early January, we reported that the Polaroid brand would soon be launching physical retail locations called Polaroid Fotobars. Well, the first of these spaces opened last Friday at the Delray Marketplace in Delray Beach, Florida.
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If you have your 35mm film processed and printed at your local lab, have you ever wondered how it’s done? In this post, I’ll take you on a behind-the-scenes tour on the entire process.
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Shutterfly is making a habit of gobbling up photo sharing services that camera companies no longer want to run. Less than half a year after acquiring Kodak Gallery from Kodak for a meager $23.8 million, Shutterfly has now taken another photo site off the hands of a company very similar to Kodak: Fujifilm. The Japanese imaging company has agreed to dump its photo sharing and printing business SeeHere into Shutterfly’s lap, shutting down the service on November 8, 2012.
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In the market for a new photo printer and not sure what to buy? Here’s a tip: shelling out a little more dough on the printer itself could potentially lead to massive savings over time.

The reason is ink, sometimes called “black gold” (or… “colored gold”?). The general rule of thumb in the printer industry is: the cheaper the printer, the more expensive it is to keep it filled with ink.
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Kodak divisions are falling left and right as the company struggles to claw its way out of bankruptcy protection. After killing off its camera business and selling off its film business earlier this year, Kodak announced today that it will shortly be pulling out of the consumer printing business in order to focus on commercial printing.
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Stuff a few thousand dots per inch into a color print, and you have yourself a pretty high resolution image that most people would approve of. What if you could stuff 100,000 dots into that same inch?

That’s what researchers were able to do recently in creating the highest-resolution photograph ever printed — and one of the smallest, to boot.
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If you’re looking for a thrifty way to have gigantic (monochrome) prints made of your photographs, look no further than your local Staples. Monica and Jess of East Coast Creative write,

Have you heard about the engineer prints from Staples? Oh.My.Goodness. They have completely changed our life for the better. Just wait, you’ll feel the same way. Take your favorite picture into Staples and ask for an oversized print (they come in multiple sizes, but the largest is 3’ by 4’. They’ll make a copy right there for you, and the best part… it costs less than $5 for a print! You’re only able to get the picture in black and white, but who cares?! It’s 5 bucks! The tricky thing is that the picture is printed on very thin paper, so you have to be careful not to bend or mark it.

They’ve written up a tutorial on how you can make a giant DIY frame for these massive prints.

Shaped Frame Family Photo [East Coast Creative]

Image credits: Photographs by Monica and Jess of East Coast Creative

Back in November of last year, we reported that Kodak had put its Kodak Gallery service up for sale and was hoping to offload it for “hundreds of millions of dollars”. A couple months later Kodak filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, and now the company has finally found a buyer for the photo sharing and printing service: Shutterfly. The sale price? Only $23.8 million. If the sale gets approved by the US Bankruptcy Court in March, Kodak Gallery’s 75 million users will be transferred over to Shutterfly unless they opt out.

(via TechCrunch)

Bloomberg writes that Kodak’s bankruptcy announcement yesterday was simply another step in CEO Antonio Perez’s grand plan to sell off the company’s photography divisions and patents in order to focus on selling digital printers and ink. At the same time, the company has been quick to reaffirm its dedication to producing film. Kodak marketing director Audrey Jonckheer was quoted by BJP today as saying,

Film (still and cinema) remains a profitable business for Kodak, and we have the broadest and most respected portfolio of films in both segments. We have taken steps to sustain the business as it has declined, and we know that there are hundreds of passionate fans of film for the artistic and quality reasons they cite. We remain committed to make film as long as there is profitable demand for it. And as I noted, it is still profitable.

That’s definitely good news for film photography lovers. Want film to survive? Just keep buying it, and hope other shooters do the same!

Kodak Bankruptcy May Get Out of Photography, Make Bet on Digital Printing [Bloomberg]

Image credit: Grama’s photo emerging from the Kodak printer at Target by Scorpions and Centaurs

Want to made giant prints of your tiny phone photos? Instead of doing the enlargement purely with Photoshop, Photojojo suggests using a scanner for high-quality enlarging. Simply resample the small photo at 360dpi, print it out on high quality matte paper, and then re-digitize it using a scanner at 360dpi and the print size you want. It’d be interesting to see a side-by-side comparison of this technique versus simply resizing in Photoshop and printing that image directly.

DIY: Turn Phone Photos into Mural-Sized Prints! [Photojojo]