Zinking In from Demo 2007


The bad news/good news for me this winter conference season is that my two favorites were overlapping on the calendar but at least geographically proximate. Last year I covered both the Lyra Imaging Symposium and Demo 2006 and then they were a couple of weeks and a few hundred miles apart. This year, they're both going on during the SAME WEEK, but fortunately for me, only three miles apart, one in Rancho Mirage, the other in Palm Desert CA. So here I am at Demo, a day late and ...

And the big Demo, at least from a printer industry standpoint, was the Zink Imaging presentation from Wednesday January 31st. The company is offering a "non-ink-jet" photo printing technology that can be reduced in size to something as small as an Ipod, and integrated right into something like a camera phone. The video of the demo is available for your viewing. And the bloggers are loving it! Check out Gizmodo's post too.

I will visit them at the Demo Pavilion when it opens in a bit and give a more detailed report. It seems, from the Printer Industry insider perspective, this is very interesting but not without its flaws. It's not particularly cheap on a per print basis (20 cents for a 2x3), nor high quality, nor fast (30 seconds for the same 2x3). To me the real story, is, well, the story. This very sophisticated Demo crowd seems to be going wild over it. More soon...

Comments

Jim Lyons said…
Surprisingly to many, no Demo God award for Zink amonng the ten awarded, but pretty nice comments from Mossberg/Magid/Miller et al in the wrap up Journalists panel. Miller's point was that Zink has an advantage of one of a very few hardware companies in a sea of social networking/search/blog software companies.
Jim Lyons said…
I've added more Zink thoughts at http://jimlyonsobservations.blogspot.com/2007/02/more-demo-2007-notes.html