The Hindu : Front Page : Instant wedding albums soon

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, Aug 30, 2006

Front Page

Front Page

Instant wedding albums soon

Anand Parthasarathy

Seven imaging products target both professional and `dummy' users

— PHOTO: Anand Parthasarathy

A WONDER MACHINE: HP's A 516 Compact Photo Printer fixes blemishes in the shot before making copies

Beijing: Goodbye, "shaadi" photographer! Your days of shooting and creating those fat wedding albums are numbered. Printing and imaging leader Hewlett Packard has just created a solution where photos taken at marriages and other events using a digital camera, can be instantly printed on the spot, using a battery-backed portable printer which churns out 4 inch by 6 inch colour glossies in less than a minute each.

And what's more, it does it after a "One Touch" Fix operation that corrects brightness, fuzziness— and even removes the `red eye' effect when bride and groom are photographed indoors using flash.

The HP Photosmart A 516 unveiled here on Tuesday is one of 70 imaging and printing products including seven printers scaled using the same technology, from entry-level products for amateurs to top-of-the-line digital lab solutions.

Weighing just over 1 kg, the A 516, which can — literally — work from one's hands, switching to batteries if required, and connects directly to digital cameras or to photos stored on a iPods, memory sticks, and other portable storage. It can also link wirelessly using Bluetooth technology.

The selling price in India is under Rs. 5,500.

For the hard core professional, HP unveiled two printers — a dedicated photo printer and a multifunction printer-scanner-copier — claimed to be the fastest photo printer, churning out instant-dry prints in 12 seconds each, which will retain their image for over 100 years.

HP Senior Vice-President for Imaging and Printing (Asia-Pacific) Chris Morgan told The Hindu that the day of the home network where TV and PC applications came together — and used a large central storage running into terabytes (that's a million million bytes) of information, much like enterprises today, is not far off.

Even printers have begun to sport huge hard disks for storage — a home printer launched on Tuesday (not yet in India) comes with four gigabytes of its own storage — enough for 4,000 photos.

HP has also `shrunk' the size of the media centre PC — a PC-TV combo that serves the command centre for home infotainment — to almost half that of today's desktop machines.

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