Just how simple it is to envisage a world where images are captured, stored and printed wherever you are was illustrated at a business summit in Ireland last month.
According to Herbert Köck, vice-president and general manager responsible for HP's Imaging and Printing Group in EMEA (Central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa), the company's strategy is to enable consumers to enjoy life more by delivering simple, rewarding experiences.
To implement the vision of being the number one consumer technology company, HP's key initiatives include driving digital photography for the home mass market, extending the value and grow its core printing and PC businesses, and deliver major contributions in digital entertainment.
"We want to deliver the best total customer experience," he said in one of the main presentations at the summit. HP intends to achieve this through a constant stream of new products in all areas of this "experience". It is to work as strenthening its strategic partnerships with such companies as Microsoft and Nokia, and position its brands to make them fully accessible, enabling its products to be enjoyed.
Mr Köck said the consumer world is becoming "digital, mobile, virtual, personal". So HP wants to accelerate the transformation from analogue and physical to digital, integrating the two worlds. Among the innovations shown to press invited from the entire EMEA 'region' was a range of new printing inks under the Vivera brand. By combining these inks with HP photographic paper, HP can now guarantee that colour prints will not fade for over a century (compared to a maximum of 40 years for traditional silver halide photographs).
According to Fritz Abraschek, director for Supply Sales within the HP Imaging and Printing Group in EMEA, 213 billion photos will be captured on digital cameras by 2008. Of these, 31 billion will be printed.
HP also launched special packs of printer paper and inks which cost just €0.35 per photo (excluding capital costs for the printer), and new ranges of Deskjet colour inkjet printers that take the new Vivera range.
HP took the opportunity to display a full range of digital cameras and printers for all segments of the market - from mass market consumers to advanced amateurs and professionals, whether in the prepress, commercial photography or graphic design fields.
Journalists were also given the opportunity to have some hands-on experience of these products, coming up with some imaginative results.
Two keynote speakers at the business summit were Paul Withington, a senior analyst at IDC, and Carl deKeyzer, a professional photographer from Belgium, who is vice-president of Magnum Photos.
Mr Withington said 25 million digital cameras were sold in Europe last year, a 58 per cent growth. The market is expected to mature next year when 4 megapixels will be the entry point and features like zoom will differentiate digital cameras from the cameraphone market. In terms of inkjet printers, the A4 market had fallen by 17 per cent to 12 million units while the all-in-one (AiO) inkjet market had grown 54 per cent to 10 million units. This year multifunction (AiO) printers will overtake single function printers.
To the question: are consumers printing their images, Mr Withington said while over a hundred images are captured on average per person every month, the French were most likely to print a high percentage of images, while the British and the Swedish were the least.
Although the tendency is for images to be shared, photos will survive and people will continue to want a hard copy. On the cameraphone issue, Mr Withington said people were likely to keep both but he foresees a break between digital cameras and PCs, with people printing directly from the camera to printers.
Mr deKeyser, who joined Magnum in 1990, spoke on his 'migration' to digital photography, his work around the world and the trends he saw in photography.