I agree that Express Digital (ED) is great for onsite printing. It is very quick to learn (teach) and get a novice printing packages with or without borders in just a few minutes.
And for doing smaller, local shows, it has a customer interface that allows ordering.
Personally, I do much larger events and while ED's printing is still great, its dealing with thousands of customers where the customer interface isn't up to the challenge.
Ironically, I used to print onsite - with scripted photoshop, as I can do more in photoshop if/when I need to. But after the first two years of printing onsite, I have not printed onsite in the past two years and noticed an important finding: no difference in sales, yet lower cost of doing show.
At least is youth sporting events, the key is to sell onsite - but not to print onsite. I can imagine, though, that with the booming internet e-commerce, where no product is instantly available (except downloads), having product in hand is not the key to business - the marketing and selling of the product is key.
That is why we employ as many as
101 viewstations (so far). Two things we've known and seen at events for the past four years is that the more photos we take, and the more viewstations we have, then the more we'll sell. That's why we've automated our process of getting images to the customers as fast as we can.
We have 2-8 photographers shooting at any given time. Usually 2-3 shooters for stage events like cheer - where there are 20-30 kids on the stage for a two minute routine, we have our own customer downloader that requires only one click of the mouse to download, categorize and publish all the images to the server - all the images from all the photographers (with readers positioned next to photographers). The server then 'sees' new images and processes them (rotate/shrink) for the viewstations in a matter of seconds. Each copy of images is automatically backed up to a second server. This process gets repeated every 3-4 minutes with 200-500 images every download. (over 90,000 images per day at our largest show so far)
With the images available to the customers on the viewstations by the time they walk over to my booth (distance being as little as 30ft, so images are available in as little as 20 seconds). For the customer, they can find their pictures in as little as two mouse clicks - either by using the search feature, or not. Their whole shopping experience is self-explanatory and needs no assistance. The only other person I have at the show besides photographers is a cashier - to collect money. Orders are mailed out later that week.
A key point - when taking any large amount of pictures - is organization. For team events, we organize by team. For individual events like gymnastics, we sort by gymnast - folders with gymnast first name and number. To shoot multiple teams/individuals - we utilize the folder creation capability of 1D bodies and shoot each team/individual into folders. When downloading, each folder is matched up with the appropriate team/individual and downloaded to the server with additional file renaming (shooter/lens/position) as per setting on our downloader software. As long as pix are organized and easy to find, customers will have a much easier and happier experience in ordering pictures.
Again, for me, automation is the key when dealing with up to 1000 customers per hour at my booth for over 12 hours per day. But for smaller events, make sure you have pictures available and organized when customers walk up to your booth - otherwise, they won't have the time and maybe (stress maybe) they'll look online when images are available.
Hammy.
