Developing and Printing Sector Expands Collection to Capture Younger Market

Developing and Printing has been a key fraction of photo and imaging retailers since the dawn of the sector. In fact, for many retailers it is the core division of their business, and for many others it is the key contributor to profitability.

However in current years this sector has dropped markedly. This is mainly due to the fact that whilst image capture plans have grown to nearly 116 million devices in August 2009, the number of people in fact printing their images has dropped. The reason for this is clear whilst previously you had to expand a film to see an image, now you can view on the camera or PC where you have stored it.

Photo division has also had an impact. Even home online printing regularity has fallen as a result of photo sharing - our results from 8 European countries show a drop from 4 billion home prints in 2006 to only 2.5 billion in the recent year. Overall, our research shows that whilst younger people take the maximum number of pictures, they have the lowest printing rate. In adding up, the European digital camera user takes 110 pictures per month yet prints less than a third of them.