Since today, Tomy is selling in Japan it’s XIAO digital camera that features an embedded Zink ink printer for producing instant photos. The concept is similar to the Fuji Instax Mini instant cameras (which themselves derived more or less directly from Polaroid insant film) with the huge difference that the Xiao (which means “small” in Chinese) is a 5megapixel digital camera, which means that you can preview the photo before printing it. The camera prints 5×7.6cm borderless photos which are said to be durable and fade resistant (still haven’t seen one).

This first model by Tomy is a bit clumsy and according to the company is targeted to women in their 30’s and 40’s (that might find it kawaii!) and families.

The pricing in Japan is of ¥34,800 for the camera and ¥880 for 20 sheets of photo paper (therefore cheaper than the Cheki/Instax mini ¥540 per 10 photos).

Zink (zero ink) is a tecnhonogy developed in the USA that allows to print photos without using ink but through a reaction to heat. You can find more details about how Zink ink works here.

Polaroid had also released a Zink product one year ago, the PoGo instant mobile printer.

Today (and for all the event) I will be the “official” live blogger for the iSummit 2008, organized by iCommons in Sapporo, Japan.

After the success of previous editions in Harvard ‘05, Rio de Janeiro ‘06 and Dubrovnik ‘07, the iSummit comes to Sapporo, one of the most innovation-oriented cities in Japan.

I’ll be using Cover it Live for the live blogging and you can follow the keynotes on the iSummit Blog.

PS: I will be updating this post later with links to concluded keynotes.

This is the opening keynote session with Heather Ford, Jimmy Wales, Joi Ito and Mohamed Nanabhay.

I guess I have a particular ability to get entangled in great events and, even though I’m on a sabbatical, I did it again… I guess that’s one of the problems of knowing a lot of cool and interesting people around the world!

After several World Business Forums, Pangea Day and barcamps, this time I’ll be in Sapporo, Japan, collaborating with the iCommons team that is organizing the iSummit ‘08. This is one of the most interesting and stimulating real life meetings on global digital culture. I’ll be in charge of the live blogging and some other interesting stuff.

The programme ranges from keynotes to labs and local events.

These are some of the keynotes:

• The Literacy Project: Encouraging Best-Practice Sharing in the Non-profit Community by Jessica Powell
• Ready to Share: Fashion and the Commons by Johanna Blakley
• Collaborative Creativity: How innovation together has stood the test of time by Rishab Ghosh
• Status of the Commons by Joi Ito
• The Future of Open Search by Jimmy Wales

The labs:

• Open Education Policy and Practice in a New Century: Implementing What Works
• Open Business
• Local Context Global Commons: Open Publishing
• DIY video
• Frontiers of Openness in Japan
• Research Workshop on Free Culture

This is a brief description taken from the official iSummit website:

The fourth global iSummit will be held in Sapporo, Japan from 29 July to 1 August, 2008. iCommons in association with Digital Garage, Creative Commons Japan and the City of Sapporo will bring together pioneers of the free Internet from over 60 countries around the world.

Inspired by Japanese innovation and hosted in a city fast becoming recognised for its modern, creative, technology-orientated approach to business and public initiatives – this year’s iSummit will be a ground-breaking event that showcases pioneering approaches to furthering digital culture around the world.

Join and follow the event on:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Youtube
• or visit the official website and blog

If you’re going to Sapporo, please drop a line and let’s meet there.

(note: the italian version of this article is available on 7th Floor online magazine)

I read in the last number of (my favorite general news) magazine, Monocle, about the struggle of film photography, the people that are trying to save it for their art and hobbies (by even stocking it in the freezer) and the advantages that it still holds against the stampeding digital alternative.

While I resurrected my passion for photography some years ago thanks to the progress of digital single-lens-reflex (D-SLR) cameras (my beloved Nikon D70 has been recently replaced by a gorgeous D300), I have recently learned to appreciate the pleasure of analog photography. I never was patient enough to learn dark room techniques, but film photography has some characteristics that might be the seeds to its survival:

- the extra dedication on composition and “thinking” of the shot. It’s just too costly (plus you don’t have immediate feedback) to shoot as if your camera were and Uzi machine gun, so you have to carefully compose and snap when you think you’ve got it
- polaroids (It has recently been announced that Polaroid will be discontinuing instant film): these pics are not only unique but also instantaneously touchable, and digital can’t just match that.
- grain: in digital it can be imitated, but it lacks the randomness of the real one.
- from the snobbish point of view, now everyone does digital, so going back to analog is a way of differentiating and has a particular “charm”.
- hardware reliability: my Nikon F3 can work with almost no energy consumption (and Nikon’s fully mechanical cameras of the F2 series can be used in the desert or in the freezing pole with no battery at all). Besides, after several decades the camera is just as valid as it was when it was first launched. Can you imagine using your present digicam in 5 years time?
- the expectancy to see the results obtained: this is not necessarily an advantage, but when I go to the lab to retrieve my developed negatives/prints, there’s that mix of anxiety and curiosity to see how did they come.

The first article that confronts digital/analog photography is “Save our skintones” by Tyler Brûlé – Monocle’s founder and editor in chief. Mr. Brûlé complains mainly about the difference there is in color quality between the two technologies, specially if compared printed stuff.

“In the pages of Vogue and InStyle leading boys and breakthrough girls appear as if they might have liver conditions judging by their skin tones” writes Mr. Brûlé

In my amateur photographic experience and professional printing experience (of high quality brochures, mags, etc) I found that the gap can be easily closed if several measures are taken:

• Printing quality: first of all, to compare the two outputs, you cannot use standard/pro printed film and a digital photo printed using a home printer. You require a professional print from digital, which impacts heavily on the quality of paper and most importantly on the quality of inks/pigments and the color gamut they allow to reproduce.
• Color correction: it is done in analog too. If you see well reproduced skin tones in a film photo print, it means that the photographer has worked on it. You must use the right film to balance the available light (tungsten, daylight) in order to reproduce the color temperature correctly. If you make use of flash/strobes you sometimes need to apply gels for the same reason. This is necessary only in color photography of course, as black&white does not suffer of this. Equivalently, in digital photography you have to select the right white balance to meet the present light. The advantage of digital is that if you shoot in raw format, you can do this after the pic has been taken, but you must remember to do it!
• Screen color calibration: the screens of our computers don’t reproduce colors correctly unless you calibrate them using dedicated hardware & software. Calibration is connected to the output source too (type of printer, technology, etc).
• When you consider the printing process of a magazine, some other technical factors must be considered. From the printing machines used (roto-offsett or flat) to the color adjustments, the constancy of them and the types/amounts of inks used (from the 4 CYMK to even 10 or more dedicated pantone inks).
• Apart from these technical aspects, I think that some fashion models look sick anyway and this is more of a trend than a printing problem!

Due to the acceleration brought by digital photography, it’s easy that you might forget to carefully work on these aspects during the workflow that will produce the printed version of your capture. But only once all these aspects have been taken care of you can try to compare a digital and an analog print… and at this point you’ll see that differences -if any- are almost not present. There’s one aspect that digital cannot reproduce, or at least not with the same philosophy, and it is grain. In film, grain is produced by the chemical interaction of different substances that produce a unique result with a random disposition of its particles. Digital grain instead is the product of a software algorithm which produces only “artificial” randomness.

So the conclusion is that to get those superb skin tones that you find in [well treated] analog photography, you must be just as careful when producing prints from digital. Conceptually the points to take care of are the same, in practice they require some different abilities that are not always present even in professional outputs.

Polaroid instant photo taken during my last visit to Berlin

I’ll discuss about how could analog photography be saved from oblivion in a future post. I think that an important change must be applied on the business model and supply chain (shift to cooperation and partnership of film producers).