Advice on moving business forward

[Justin]

A company producing incredible quality canvasses went under doesn't bode well! Will this be a £5000 investment? I think I would outsource and charge a mark up if you are aiming at the local market, no risk and once large format makes a profit you can justify the investment.

Looking at the prices of Rosewood I'm not surprised! Can it really be justified on something that's covered up? I guess the answer was no. Contracting out may well be an option if I can find a reputable company.

Investment for this would be £2.5k plus stock etc. So not huge in the scale of things but big enough.

[Justin]

Interesting to see other items, photo blocks, acrylics etc. that could be done, will see how prices compare with Sublimation on some items.

I'm swinging more back towards the canvas setup tbh right now, I don't think spending £5k on a large format press and everything that goes with it is really an option, 3 phase upgrade as well

[ArtyGamer]

Looking at the prices of Rosewood I'm not surprised! Can it really be justified on something that's covered up? I guess the answer was no. Contracting out may well be an option if I can find a reputable company.

Investment for this would be £2.5k plus stock etc. So not huge in the scale of things but big enough.

If I said rosewood, I meant redwood, sorry It's not to do with whether it's covered up or not, it's to do with how long it can be stretched without any sign of warping otherwise you're going to have to keep getting it re-stretched at a fee from any framer who has this service. I have maybe a dozen framed canvases around the house which use pine and other non-redwoods for the frame, and they're all sagging. The ones from PhotoArtistry are still exactly as they were the day they were delivered, same goes for the actual vibrancy and colour accuracy of the print itself. Their problem, sadly, was that they were competing in an industry where folk with cheap printers, cheap canvas, and wire-stitched thin-framed stretcher bars (with no central structure) were able to offer the equivalent of a £120 canvas from them for around £30. They just couldn't compete. If anything, they were TOO big on quality. Great for folk like me who want their designs to be beautiful and to last a lifetime, but for folk who want to bang something up above their fireplace for the cost of a few pints of lager, they were just too much.

If I'd known what equipment they were using before they shut down, I'd have tried to get the same myself. I wouldn't necessarily have gone as far as they did with the stretcher bars and devoured the margins, but I'd at least have been able to offer people seriously high quality prints. Just to give you an idea of their quality, I actually emailed them at the time to congratulate them on being the only people out of eight companies who were able to actually produce fine detail from the test art that I sent them. My comparison was between them and PhotoCanvas who, believe it or not, were actually better quality than the others I'd tried. I'd love to be able to get that sort of quality on a large-format canvas again so if you end up going for it, I'd be happy to buy a large print as a test.

[ArferMo]

I see she paid 10K for the printer back in 2002 http://startups.co.uk/photoartistry-lim ... e-herbert/

[GoonerGary]

Good article, but it is typical of that era when digital photography was only emerging. People dumping their high quality cameras and paying astronomical prices for equipment that didn't come close to what they had, but everyone was told to go digital. The digital equipment of that era only had a short lifespan as it was quickly being replaced by better models and you can only re-mortgage your house once to pay for it all! Paying £10K for a printer and having to replace it?

But 10K is nothing in the pro printing business. She is then up against all the have-a-go amateur photographers who want to print stuff themselves with their new fancy digital equipment so where is her customer base? Like many pro labs, only a handful survived and they all had their bad spells. I was never a fan of canvas printing, because it had that tacky high street photography studio label attached to it, but that print on the left above is beautiful. I was asked to do lots of canvases, but refused and stuck to my arty 'watercolour paper' fine art printing. But as I said above, a limited large format customer base with a huge investment is high risk, there are loads of products which can be printed in small format, you just need to charm those customers.

[ArtyGamer]

I know... I read that article on my 'phone this morning and thought "I wonder how quickly that £10k printer became obsolete and practically worthless". My first PC was an AST Advantage 15 (I was an Amiga nut with a 4040T until the last possible moment) and cost me £2550 at the time. It was a Pentium 100 with a 1.2GB HDD and 16MB of RAM. Two years later I couldn't even sell it for £250 when I was going for a replacement. Have to admit though, I love that she cared about her own work enough to spend that sort of money to get it right, even if she did have to resort to turning it into a subcontract business to cover the costs.

The print on the left really was stunning. I'm not a Street Fighter fan, but I love the artwork, so it was almost painful to give the print away to a friend who is crazy about Street Fighter. I repainted (Photoshop) a Dark Knight promo with Joker, Batman, and Harvey Dent... sent it to them to get a 6ft-across print of it and it was just glorious. Detail that I was sure would vanish was retained and the colour accuracy was, as far as my eyes are concerned, spot on. You're dead right about that high-street stigma though as most places around me also offer canvas printing and it looks like crap, but people seem to fall over themselves to get huge blurred photos of their babies printed on weird cotton-feeling canvas over paper-thin stretcher bars.

Excuse me... I have the sudden urge to go hug one of my kids. And photograph it.