(Special Report) - 2008 is a depressingly unexciting year for photo printers and printers in general, for that matter. Obviously everyone from HP to Kodak to Canon is working feverishly in their R&D labs to reveal a disrupting technology. They just never have anything to show for their time, effort and capital, other than a lot of false promises and disappointing results. The same is true for 2008 and maybe even the next few years.

According to what we heard at CES in our long interviews with printer makers, the most you can expect is a slight increase in printing speeds, but printing efficiency (in relation to ink preservation) is expected to remain the same. In simpler terms, that means upcoming printers might be able to print 24 pages per minute, instead of 22, but ink longevity and cost per cartridge aren't going to decline in the near future. And why would they? After all, this is a high margin business, so it makes sense to cannibalize consumers. It's not like we have much of a choice.

One interesting thing we noted, however, was a lot of custom bundled packages and online photo sharing/editing/printing options. With a lot of these companies, you can share your photos online (as if Flickr wasn't enough), edit them effortlessly without being a Photoshop Guru and order a variety of print sizes through mail. You could consider this to be the future of photo printers.

32-Inch Digital Photo Display A Reality

What you will notice is that on a packaged deal, the value is rising. It's just not noticeable unless you take advantage of a lot of these options, and it's nonexistent in areas that matter the most - photo quality and printing efficiency. For instance, if you already have Photoshop and you regularly use Flickr, the included bundle isn't anything to be excited about. That's where we believe a lot of these companies are falling short of our expectations, but from their perspective, they are betting on the lack of awareness in the mainstream market to enhance their product's overall value.

Either way, the market looks to be dull this year and maybe even in 2009 and beyond. Again, companies tell us, there's only so much we could do in such areas to make consumers go wow, and those of us who complain are too technologically oriented for own good, a few of them commented. It's not meant to be criticizing, but what we, as bleeding edge users demand, is very different from what the mainstream users want.

Perhaps that's why cost per photo on home printers is the next battle a lot of them are focusing on. Kodak, for instance, was able to reduce the average price per photo printed on a home photo printer from $.50 to $.10. These are the meaningful changes that we are talking about, but how mainstream are they?

So, all in all, the future of photos printers look bleak with a few meaningful changes here and there, but nothing amazing that will have us switch our printers overnight. 

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