davidbau.com

3R Paper Market Failure

Printing baby photos, I have been reading about Kodak's cheap-ink printers, which seem like a pretty good idea. I dislike being overcharged for inks, and it's great that Kodak has tried to step in with rational pricing. Does anybody have any experience with the Kodak printers?

But while we're thinking about rational prices and saving ink, here is real a photo printing puzzle...

3R is better

The 3.5x5 (3R) photo size is nicer than 4x6 (4R) size - the smaller size is easier to stick in a pocket, and albums with that size allow more uniform whitespace, and are more tasteful. And it should be cheaper - you could save about 20% of your printer ink simply by printing the smaller size. But although my Epson R800 has a setting to print on 3.5x5 paper, I can't find any source for precut 3R inkjet photo paper.

Nothing at that size is sold by Epson, Canon, Kodak, HP, or any of the independent paper brands that I could find. There is a lot of precut 4x6 everywhere, but even if a manufacturer has a part-number for 3.5x5, they don't actually sell any in practice. On the web, there is nothing in precut 3R but some dye-sub paper from Olympus. Not even on Ebay.

Why the missing paper size? Shouldn't be there enough demand for some niche paper manufacturer to run their cutting machine at that size? Why can I choose between 100 different types of cameras, but paper comes in only 4x6?

Market failures like this puzzle me.

Posted by David at July 16, 2007 08:26 PM