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Oblo & Whyteck Kiosks


Nick

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Does anyone have any comments about these range of kiosk?

Oblo, being sold by Siimagingsoloutions, used to be sold by Ovid before Fotoshop went down (part of the same group).  Looks very nice, but any real user comments?

Whytech?  Been around longer, looks very solid, any comments?

Its the back up and ease that the software can be customised that I now nothing about.

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We run 3 Whitechs alongside 12 Image Boxes and 3 E-Boxes. The Whitechs have great back-end functionality with all the features others charge to 'unlock' built in. Volume / banded pricing, templates, greeting cards and the ability to produce value added prints are all a big plus. Only negative would be the screen graphics which are very dated. We have customised ours to get arround this.

The Whitechs also have a really good system for club-card and customer information capture. In fact there is so much more we could do with ours if we wanted to take full advantage.

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These are the features we use;

Express lane - where the customer can choose to have all images printed

Greeting Cards

Album and Scrapbooking templates

Images to CD

Text, red eye and PhotoShop type tools

Staged pricing - recognising volume discounts

Differential pricing - for borders, red eye etc

We don't use these;

Customers having to enter their name/address before use. It would be odd having 3 kiosks that asked and the rest not requiring this.

Club Card coupon codes

Film Processing / Reprint drop off feature

Link to their POS software as we run a different system

FTP (yet)

Further benefits of the Whitech is that it will ask after the order is completed about paper surface and borders. This has been a problem with Agfa kiosks as customers will often select their photos then want to add borders or change the surface at the last stage - by which time is becomes a hassle going back through the list and changing each one.

Soon we will dedicate our Whitechs to Digital Scrapbooking as we see this as a big growth opportunity. They will still handle regular work but we will site them in an area of the store specifically for this service.

Our customers like the Whitechs, staff like the Image Box Vs. 5 and I prefer Image Box Vs. 6 with Lucidiom software. Thats because it's graphics look great and it has many of the Whitech features but is packaged better.

PS. Our Whitechs run on the Lucidiom type slimline black kiosks. I have seen some of their proprietary boxes and they look ancient.

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  • 5 months later...

I have whitech, its so unreliable and I have had no support from Whitech Europe since I purchase it 2 years ago. They never even mail me etc....

I have always dealt with australia, more supportive, tell them what europe ltd service is like, because they have a good product badly looked after in europe.

See your inbox, I have sent you one of the directors email in australia, she gets things done!.

I also have a G4 and G3, customers prefer easy Kodak layout. G4 has one odd problem it keeps telling you its run out of reciept paper when it hasn't.

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I have just sold up my interest in six camera stores which I ran on the Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia. I did this to return to the UK to take back the reigns at Whitech and get it back to the service levels it provided two years ago before I left.

But my comments are about my experience as a retailer...

In Australia Kodak allows you to have Whitech software on their Kodak G3s and G4s because knowledgeable retailers demand it.

We had six Kodak Kiosk heads with Whitech software in each of our stores all feeding back to a minilab (Noritsu, Fuji, agfa and Konica).

We profitted from being able to charge for borders, matte, postcards and the ultimate profit centre - CD burns ! We only charged 5c /feature for most add-ons but that made it accessible and thus successful.

When you are forced by the majors to reduce prices to 29c (australian) then getting an extra 5c for say matte paper (which as you know cost no extra) meant a substancial benefit.

we found, along with other retailers that consumers took up an offer of an add-on at the rate of about 1 in 4. So offerring four add-ons meant each consumer would take at least one extra feature ! In difficult times, 'every little counts'.

Hope this helps.

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Whitech would be our number one supplier.Their service is excellent and the product is one of the best on the market. After 3 years with the kiosks we're still finding stuff we are not yet using. Only recently we've activated the on-screen promo which works like lotto - spitting out vouchers and flashing up deals the customer can use next time they visit.

The points made about the value added products is extremely valid. We charge 5c extra for borders, with the same for other services. It all adds up and is never a problem for customers.

Would definitely recommend the on-line help. They dial into our system and fix any issues quickly.

If you have a problem with Whitech I would suggest an email to their Head Office in Sydney but it looks like help is on its way!

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