The Dead Pixels Society podcast
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Speed, Reliability, and Innovation: Why Dye-Sub Printing Still Matters with Jeffrey Huang, HiTi Digital
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The physical photograph is making a powerful comeback, and dye sublimation printing technology stands at the forefront of this renaissance. In this eye-opening conversation with Jeff Huang, corporate officer of Taiwan-based HiTi Digital, we explore how this 25-year-old company has positioned itself as a unique force in the printing industry by manufacturing both printers and consumables in-house.
What makes dye sublimation printing superior to inkjet for event photography? According to Huang, it comes down to "speed, speed, and speed." While inkjet printers place individual dots, dye-sub printers transfer entire lines simultaneously, dramatically reducing printing time. Beyond speed, the technology offers remarkable reliability—printers can sit unused for months and still work perfectly when needed, a critical advantage for seasonal businesses like photo booths and event photography.
We dive deep into the growing markets where physical prints remain highly valued. Photo booth operators are thriving at weddings, corporate events, and social gatherings, where guests crave tangible mementos of special moments. Sports photography represents another booming sector, with parents willingly spending $60-100 for high-quality prints of their athletic children. These aren't just photos—they're treasured keepsakes that capture fleeting moments in ways digital images simply cannot.
Huang also addresses how technological advancements have overcome historical concerns about dye-sublimation print longevity. Through multiple formula revisions and the addition of specialized protective layers, modern dye-sub prints maintain their quality for years, even under challenging conditions.
Discover why, in a world saturated with digital images, the physical photograph continues to hold powerful
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Hosted and produced by Gary Pageau
Edited by Olivia Pageau
Announcer: Erin Manning
Welcome to the Dead Pixels Society podcast, the photo imaging industry's leading news source. Here's your host, Gary Pageau. The Dead Pixel Society podcast is brought to you by Mediaclip, Advertek Printing and Independent Photo Imagers.
Gary Pageau:Hello again and welcome to the Deads Pixel Society podcast. I'm your host, Gary Pageau, and today we're joined by Jeff Huang, who is the corporate officer of HiTi Digital, and they're based in Taiwan. They are a dye- sub printer and media manufacturer and they primarily focus on the photo book and event photography markets. Hi, Jeff, how are you today?
Jeffrey Huang:I'm good, I'm doing well. Thank you, Gary.
Gary Pageau:So your company's actually been around for a long time in the DICE subspace. Can you walk us through that journey?
Jeffrey Huang:Okay, this year is the 25th year for Hi-T. We're actually very young for companies that are currently in this space, but the technology has been around since about the late 80s, early 90s, so we were there pretty much from the beginning. We're based in Taiwan. It was started by a bunch of engineers who uh wanted to work on this technology and we are a listed company in taiwan. We started 20 years ago, started making uh cut sheet photo printers for all sorts of applications. We our main customer back then was passport photo operators, so we'll have a lot of customers who would operate their shop and print passport photos, and we've had a long chain of useful, reliable all the good words that you can put on it printers and we are now one of the. I think there's now currently five companies that are in this space and we're one of them and we're rather unique, which I think we'll talk about going forward.
Gary Pageau:Yeah, let's just dive right into that piece the uniqueness. In fact, you're kind of an engineering-based company and you do everything yourself.
Jeffrey Huang:Yes, so for the Dye-sub printer there's obviously two parts. There is the printer itself and then there is the media, or the consumables. And the consumables there is a paper the photo paper that we print on, and then there's the dice-up ribbon. So we might talk a little bit about that as well. But basically there's a consumable in the printer, and every single manufacturer currently in the space either make the printer or they make the consumable and they'll buy the other to create a package and sell to a customer. We're the only one that makes both the printer and the paper and the ribbon. So we are a one-stop shop. We're vertically integrated. We have some knowledge of the the industry that people might have individually but never in one place like we do.
Gary Pageau:So you're able to tune probably your media to your printers pretty closely right.
Jeffrey Huang:Yes. So I think this gets into a new product. So we recently are coming out with a new product that's coming out at the end of this year and we were able to tune our printers to print with a competitor's media without any input from them. So we didn't have like, they didn't give us their specs, they didn't give us their color charts or anything. We took their media, we looked at it and then, with our knowledge of our own media and their media and our printer, we're going to say, okay, this is probably how theirs work and we can tune our printer to to fit their media so that they can use ours and theirs.
Jeffrey Huang:And you know, all printers from the beginning of time in in this dice up world till now have been tuned for one specific media. Uh, usually that media has a very thin uh gap in terms of their usability. You have to tune every spec to make sure that it's just for this media. And to be able to do it to two different types of media manufactured by two companies in multiple locations is. It's a technological innovation. Even though it's probably very specific to our industry, it is special.
Gary Pageau:Yeah, there probably aren't a lot of people saying I really wish I could get some different media for this printer. But, like you said, it's for for your niche. It's probably would be work well for either.
Jeffrey Huang:You're trying to put your printer into some place where they've already got an existing contract for media, so it would work well with that yeah, so we specifically are aimed at operators who have maybe like between 5 and 20 printers, where they have to keep on replacing printers but they can't afford to just check out their fleet and then pick a new one up, right? Uh, so they may have to chuck two or three out, they'll buy some bar printer, but they're still going to keep the media on hand for their old printers and then they can use their old media and our printers and then slowly switch over, and we'll be happy with that because you know it gets our foot in the door and some of these larger operators, and also it helps our customers because they now have a choice, right, if you're. If the media suddenly doesn't come over from overseas, which it always does now you have to worry about supply issues. Well, now you have two choices. You have two possibilities of what you need to use. Yeah, that offers a bit of um risk mitigation.
Gary Pageau:I think is the but that product's not out of the market yet right so so we don't want to talk quite much about that, because you said that was going to be coming when uh end of this year okay, so, so it's near term, but it's not. So what's your portfolio like now of products? Cause you said you started in passports. I'm sure you're probably still doing that, and then you're also in the event space and the photo booth space. I'm sure there's different requirements for each of those.
Jeffrey Huang:So we only have printers.
Jeffrey Huang:So, and even though we work for the events and photo booth space, we don't actually make a photo booth. So we have photo printers and we have card printers. Those are the only things we have and our photo printers. We have two models because the third one is coming out this year. So two models. There's a small one for the home, so that we call it the 322. It's a printer about this big we say it's a perfect gift for grandma because you know, you put it on her desk and then she can print out her grandchildren's photos. And then we have the 525, which is our sort of mainline roll type printer that is designed for commercial work.
Jeffrey Huang:It's printing all over the world. It's been on the market for a couple of years and we're very proud.
Gary Pageau:So you don't really have to customize that the industrial printer for different markets.
Jeffrey Huang:It's able to serve all of those. We have tuned it to the point where it can. So obviously there for photo booth markets, for event photos and for the studios. They have different requirements for what their photo printers need to be. Some want color tables to be, you know, better off for flesh tones. In fact, this is a very interesting thing that I we've seen is that we consistently get a request from china to make the face wider when they're putting and we consistently, when we go to the us, they say oh, we see your photos and your faces are paler than everybody else, right?
Jeffrey Huang:the other side has like you know, a more lively looking face and we're like that's because when we have we're in the asian market, we have a whiter skin tone to make them look cooler, more beautiful, and then in in the us we have a different uh requirement, so we have tuned our printers for this kind of stuff. Yeah, but in general what people want is a reliable print. They want it in the size sizes that people are used to. So two by six, four by six, six by eight, five by seven, and so our printers can do all those things we.
Jeffrey Huang:We have only one printer and it can do. Right now I can do all the all of the things so you can just swap out the magazines on that yes, so you swap out. You swap out the media, you put in a different size and it's basically any of the six inch, five, five inch printing that you would.
Gary Pageau:So one of the things you hear is you know the, you know inkjet coming into this marketplace. What are some of the advantages of Dye-sub versus inkjet for this sort of instant on-site type printing?
Jeffrey Huang:I once heard this said by our founder. But the advantage of dye-s ub? There's three advantages. It's speed, speed and speed, because in instead of printing a dot we print a line. So that means that for six inches of a six inch printhead we're printing like this and you will always be faster than printing inkjet, because inkjet is doing a dot, is doing like that a couple thousand times, uh, during a printing cycle, whereas we do a line and we do a couple hundred printing cycles right. So that gives us a speed advantage.
Jeffrey Huang:And when you're waiting, when you're at a, at an event, you're not wanting, wanting to sit there and watch that thing go like this quite loudly in the event. The second advantage we have is that we don't clog up. So Inkjet has a problem where the ink is liquid but it likes to turn solid and so when you are printing the photo, if you haven't used your printer for about two or three months, all the ink clogs up in the little head and then it comes out with either a very bad picture or it doesn't print. And in the event space, in the photo booth space, usually printing is done sort of at the very end of the year, sort of september to to december, because that's when the holiday season is, and also maybe during easter or school holidays. That's when they print, and so they might have two or three months in between where they're either not printing or they're printing at very small quantities, right, and they're making most of their money in these two periods and the the last thing you want to do is it's October 1st, you break out your printer, you're ready to do a lot of work because you know it's halloween season and you've got all these customers lined up, and then suddenly you say, oh, your printer is not printed, and then you want to get it repaired.
Jeffrey Huang:But the repair shop gets all these people who haven't looked at their printer in three months, and then the printer is not working. They don't have a timeline for when you can have it repaired. That's a huge issue, right? That's not how you run a business. You want reliability and because is a solid state technology, everything you use is solid. There isn't that issue. It will pick up your printer after two or three months, two or three years even. It will work and then it will be able to work for you in your business. That's our advertising.
Gary Pageau:But there are probably some maintenance things you have to do to to maintain your dyso printer. I'm sure can you really leave it for three years and then just turn it on and hope it works.
Jeffrey Huang:Oh, so our maintenance is usually based on print count so every couple, a couple hundred prints.
Jeffrey Huang:You want to take a, a little microfiber cloth, put some alcohol in it and then, like, stick it in there, clean out the printhead. We want to clean the rollers a bit but in terms of actual day-to-day mileage maintenance it's not that much. If you don't store your printer in an ideal condition, if you don't store it somewhere where it's room temperature and ideal humidity, it might do something stupid. But we have had people just pull printers a couple of months from their last print. Pull it out, put the ribbon in. It works. It is that magical.
Gary Pageau:So one of the things you always used to hear about dye sublimation printing was fading issues right With either you know if they put in their pocket there was heat, you know it kind of turned dark or it would just fade over time if exposed to the sun. What's been happening in terms of technology to deal with those issues?
Jeffrey Huang:so we have been completely revamping our formula about three or four times in the past five years in order to get our formula right. These are formulas that are in the house so that you won't see in our products. With our new formula, that really doesn't happen. There's still some color loss, but it's not really visible. The trick is that we have added a lot of additives into our uh protective layer so when our, instead of yellow, magenta and cyan, we have a fourth layer called the oc layer, the optical layer and that is a.
Jeffrey Huang:That's basically a cover for your phone.
Gary Pageau:Right, almost like a laminate layer because I know some people are working with that. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Jeffrey Huang:Is that?
Gary Pageau:even on your small home printer. Is that also included in that? So you're getting quote unquote industrial technology in your home printer.
Jeffrey Huang:You know our home printer not to toot our own horn I think that is a very good deal. You know, we sell it for less than 200 bucks and, yeah, you can basically get printing quality that is fairly indistinguishable from a professional printer. It's just very slow. It's, I think, five times five times slower, but it is good quality print. You can only do four by six, but it is a good little printer, yeah, and grandma will be very pleased. So we in our optical layer we've added a lot of things that are anti-uv, that are anti-heat, um, that are anti-moisture, and we do extensive testing on our own prints. Like we print out thousands of photos on on a printer and then we'll chuck them all in a in a chamber and then we set the temperature to 60 degrees celsius, which is what 150, 160 fahrenheit, and then we keep it in there for days on end at high humidity and see what happens to it. And so, unless your pocket is, you know, near the near boiling temperature, right, you shouldn't have those issues, right?
Jeffrey Huang:yeah, yeah the technology has advanced a lot. We've done a lot of work to it and um our competitors and other companies in our industry have done a lot to it yeah, so the photo lasts as long as you, as you expect the photo to because that is one of the things.
Gary Pageau:I know some of your competitors have done a lot in that area as well and I just think that's that was sort of like the knock against. It was that you know it's okay for quickie prints or for theme parks or things like that, where you know you're gonna have it on hand and it's cool, but if it fades in three years, who cares? Because you know it was just you and sasquatch at the theme park, kind of thing. But now that I think people are. You know, I think people think about print differently now. I think people who are going to go through the effort of printing something are expecting permanence.
Jeffrey Huang:Our founder once again has one jokingly cursed Kodak not the company, the original founder of the company because he's too good of a job.
Jeffrey Huang:The standards for photo printing are extremely high.
Jeffrey Huang:You know, if a missile, if Lockheed Martin makes a missile and then it lands a meter away, it'll be good enough, that's a good missile. If we make a printer and between the yellow and the magenta and the cyan it lands more than about five microns away, you'll notice, right, because you know you'll see, you'll see the yellow and the red not quite line up right, and then you'll notice exactly that this is not a good picture. It's blurry, right, and so the standards for even your regular print, which you know costs between cents and a dollar and it has to be nearly perfect, our quality control guys, you know, have turned their their hair out to get these little foibles out of their, out of the system. And so, yeah, the the printing industry has evolved so much in the past 20 years, especially with dice up, because we're a new technology and there's a lot of things that we can do that traditional silver halide inkjet can't. And so you know, our print quality, our print conditions and our longevity are very, very high. It's a good technology.
Gary Pageau:Looking forward. Like you know you always hear about, you know people aren't printing, you know people don't want to print or you know it's good enough on their phones or whatever. And yet in a lot of the markets you serve it's actually booming. You know you're. You have a presence at the photo booth expo, which I've never been to, but I've heard it's great and that is one of the, from what I've seen, one of the most energetic and trade shows out there for printing, because there's a lot of juice in that industry. Can you talk a little bit about what's driving the photo booth industry and kind of talking a little bit about, you know, doing away with this presumption that people don't want to print?
Jeffrey Huang:Broadly. When we look at research of the market, they say that the market's growing about five, maybe 10% per year at the moment, but it's mostly concentrated in event photos and photo booth photos. For those who are not familiar, these are people who have this large screen, they put it on a stand and then they take it to an event or take it to a specific location and they'll take a picture of you. Maybe there's a little bit of fun stuff on their photo booth where you can, like you know, add hearts, add frames, whatever.
Jeffrey Huang:Then they put out the photo and give it to you instantly. This sector is growing a lot faster than the rest of the sectors. It is up and coming, it's very energetic, as you said, and pbx has been growing every single year. Um, and the reason is simply that when you have a photo that is in your pocket, in your phone, it doesn't matter as much. You know, everybody has thousands of photo on facebook and instagram and in their phone storage, and how many have you actually taken out? If I look at it on my own phone, it's full of pictures of my own car, not because I like my car, because I need to capture where I parked it, pictures of my car and the parking space that I'm parked in, just to remind myself where I park. I don't go back to those photos right, those are for reminding.
Jeffrey Huang:But when you take the photo printing experience to somewhere or something or some time, that is special. People want that souvenir. It is a very good souvenir because it's always custom, it's always, you know, resonates with the person who buys it because it's their face and always remind them of a happy time. Because we take them to places like the weddings. We take them to, you know, school graduations. We take them to amusement parks and we take them to anywhere where you might have fun. The photo booth follows you right. These photo booths are able to take photos where you're at your happiest, you're at your most excited, you're with your friends, um with your family, right, these are times that you want to capture and that's where printing right now for photo printing at least is having its.
Jeffrey Huang:Its renaissance is because people really want to be able to capture those moments and in those cases they want something physical, because the physical thing they can show people, they can put on their wall, they can put on their desk, they have an actual memento rather than just having data. And also, when you're with a younger crowd, instagram becomes less value. Right, everybody has an instagram account. Everybody posts pictures of themselves that are looking quite attractive, quite, quite happy and filtered filtered.
Jeffrey Huang:Everybody is getting likes, but people know, oh, that's not quite the same. You know you can get 100 likes on social media. That's not the same as some of your friends coming over to your house and say, oh, where was this photo? You know where was this event? Yeah, I remember that we had so much fun, remember when, when, yada, yada, yada right, and so that has way more value. And people are starting to realize that Not all at once, not a lot of people are still oh what's the? Point of this.
Jeffrey Huang:But you know we're seeing it a lot in young people and we're seeing it a lot in the older crowd as well if you're retired, that people actually do want to have fun.
Gary Pageau:And want to have fun and they want to have memory of that fun in physical form. Yeah, it is amazing because, like I've seen, you know a lot of different startups that have started with sort of you know, it's a very simple, you know piece of software, either on a tablet or in a very simple kiosk type thing, and they're going in all sorts of places, they're going into you know, people are putting them in bars now, which I I think is kind of crazy. But what's interesting to me is the ones that aren't. That I don't think are doing as well. Are the ones that are trying to be multi-featured, right, it's like, okay, not only is it going to be a photo booth, but we're also going to do like it's going to do song downloads and transactions, sort of this multifaceted kiosk thing. Do song downloads and transactions, sort of this multifaceted kiosk thing? Are you observing the same thing? That basically, the dedicated photo booth seems to be a stronger proposition?
Jeffrey Huang:We don't think there's ever a need to make a photo booth that has other functions the only other functions. Maybe people also want to upload it on their phone.
Gary Pageau:Right, yeah, yeah.
Jeffrey Huang:The way that we've seen it is that people do actually want to print and sometimes people add additional functions, more of a as a get out clause. So I know I'm not getting any purchase on this photo front, or I don't. I'm afraid that people might not be printing. So you know, I add a function, like I add music, or I add I don't know you know some app onto it. Then it always turns out that those who are not focused on it sort of just die away because you don't know what your thing is, whereas they see a photo booth. And now most people who have been around you know to these events now, oh, that's a photo booth.
Jeffrey Huang:I can take a photo there and they know that's what it's for. And we've seen these sort of multifunction photo booths die out because you don't need it.
Gary Pageau:The function photo booths die out because you don't need it.
Jeffrey Huang:The thing that makes you money, the thing that people are there for, is the photo, so why add all these superfluous stuff? That just ruins your UI and makes it sort of not very clear what you want to do. Right, the photo booth to print photo. That's what it's called, right?
Gary Pageau:yeah, it's interesting now. You almost can't go to a wedding now, in the united states at least, where you know the photographer is not only a photographer, but they usually have a second shooter, they also have a videographer. They got a drone operator and then they also probably have a photo booth and they might even be the dj. I mean, all the stuff. They've got a drone operator and then they also probably have a photo booth and they might even be the DJ.
Jeffrey Huang:All the stuff they've got to learn is just crazy with sort of capturing that event. It's a very busy job, as I've learned these event people love to have fun, by the way, when you see them at PBX.
Jeffrey Huang:They are some of the most cheerful people you've ever seen, and you can always tell, uh, when people come up to to you and they want to test your stuff. So we, uh, last time we had not our own photo booth but a photo booth set up there with our printer, and you can always tell um which operators are veterans, because they'll come up and they'll throw their own pose and their pose will be the happiest and the most dynamic. Those are the, the guys who've been around the longest. And you see, the guys who are sort of new to the industry, and they're just, you know, just smiling and then you know, okay, you need some more time having fun before before, before you're you, you know how this industry works so what are the areas of event photography are you getting into?
Gary Pageau:obviously there's the social events, but are what about like sports or anything like that?
Jeffrey Huang:so, as you. Sports is huge because, especially in the US I think it's not so much in Asia or Europe but Americans still have kids, and American kids have to play sports. If you're not doing baseball, you're doing football. If you're not doing football, you're doing basketball or lacrosse. I have never, ever even played lacrosse, but you know dozens of sport across the board and there's always one event in every single town across the united states once a week.
Jeffrey Huang:Basically, you always expect there to be at least one event there, and so that gives us a lot of opportunities as well as a printer manufacturer, but also for our customers that you can go out there, you can take a photo, and the parents? For them, a photo of the child is worth way more than what you have to pay as a photographer for, for the, for the print, right, um, we've seen people spend tens, up to hundreds of dollars on a promising sportsman, like a child in high school. He's doing well on the basketball team, and their customers, their parents, will spend, you know, 60, 80, 100 on a single print. That's right, eight inches, it's nice and large, you can put it on your wall, it's part of your college resume, so that's really important, right, um, they would spend dozens of dollars on these things. And the photographer? They only work one day a week. They just work for the school.
Gary Pageau:Well, they've got other stuff they do, they go admin, but you know they're big names out there.
Gary Pageau:And it's a skill.
Jeffrey Huang:Like you know, sports photography is hard.
Gary Pageau:Yeah, it's very hard. Yeah, I know some people in that space it's. You know, they make it look easy and they capture great images, but there's a lot of technical knowledge, there's a lot of equipment investment.
Gary Pageau:Oh yeah, you know the lenses for a really good you know telephoto lens or somebody knowing the pace of a game, where to stand, where to be and all that stuff is you know. I would say it's funny where they think, where people think that you know they buy a DSLR or a mirrorless camera, they buy a lens, they think they're automatically a photographer.
Jeffrey Huang:I forgot where I heard this from, but I've heard that if you go to a sports event, don't look at the coaches or the players. If you see the photographer take up his camera, you know somebody's about to score there you go. They don't mess about. They're not taking random photos. If some, if they pick up their cameras, it's because they know something cool is about to happen.
Jeffrey Huang:I've never heard of that, but that makes so much sense exactly so much sense yeah, so sports photo is huge and it's a growing sector and there is a very and it's not just sports, the school part of it as well. So graduation photos is a huge thing.
Gary Pageau:Really.
Jeffrey Huang:Yeah.
Gary Pageau:How does that work? Because I know a lot of people in that business and they usually just capture and ship later. What are they doing on site?
Jeffrey Huang:ship later. What are they doing on site? Um, so you have the book, right, you have the graduation book, and people still buy those. But they still want to take photos, one for testing. So when you take a photo, if you see it on your tiny dslr screen, if you see it on your ipad, that doesn't really show what the photo is, right, good, professional printers will have the photo on hand to see what it is. But also, um, it's a extra feature that you can give to your, to the student, right, you can say this is what you look like, this is what you look like.
Gary Pageau:You look quite cool, quite so it's almost like a proof almost, yeah, exactly.
Jeffrey Huang:This is something that goes back um to the photo industry sort of earlier is that they discovered that if you print out the photo and you show it to somebody, people like the photo and they'll just buy it because you know it's a split of the moment thing, it's not very expensive and if you go to um, they don't do it nearly as much now, but if you go to an amusement park for for these kind of things 10 years ago, they'll print out every photo like they'll print out the photo of you doing this on the on the slip and slide, because they know that some people will just look at them and go that is hilarious.
Jeffrey Huang:I'm going to buy that, I'm going to share with my friend, and even if they don't put it on the wall cause it looks too silly, all you care about is getting them to buy it Right, yeah, exactly.
Gary Pageau:So has the amusement park gone away from the spec printing and just gone to like the kiosk thing we can print on site because because I know a lot of amusement parks do that- uh, we are less involved as a company, but as an industry.
Jeffrey Huang:I think dice up is still quite large.
Gary Pageau:I don't exactly know how they print, because they can print on a kiosk or on a well, a lot of them do the thing where you exit the ride, you look at the screen and you see your picture up there and you can get a print right there, you know. So I imagine it's it's dye, sub or something, but it's just. But it's not on. It's not just on spec, which is what you were talking about, where you just automatically print it because imagine there's a lot of waste there yes, so now nowadays they do the big screen because you can see it on a big screen and it's and it's clear.
Jeffrey Huang:In the past they'll just print it out, but in terms of how they actually do it, I think it's different from park to park.
Gary Pageau:Uh, for us, you know, as long as the printer in the back is dice up, you can do what you like that's all you guys care about so um you're not as involved in the retail space like the retail kiosk space in the, but it seems to be like in the us there's more interest in that now and I think it goes back and forth with, you know, people wanting to have the big or not necessarily big but the the production machinery, because they want to drive volume towards that. But there is, I think, a growing interest now in on-site DISA printing just really quick at a kiosk. Are you getting any feedback? I know you're not in that growing market a lot right now, but what is your perception on that?
Jeffrey Huang:So that sector is still the largest part of our market. Obviously, we are not involved, but Walgreens, for example, is still the largest consumer of printers in the world Not just in the US but in the world by a significant margin and it's a huge industry. You get parents, you get grandparents who really need to print something and they'll just go to one of these photo finishers and they will print it out. In Europe, we know that the second largest company is over there and they're also very, very, very successful. They're growing extremely fast as well. I'm not sure about the sort of smaller retailers. Maybe there's studios who are picking this up. Because we have a distributor between us, we don't get to contact them. Love to hear more about it but, these are.
Jeffrey Huang:These are. These are growing industries. Uh, people are still printing because they're not doing this at home on the inkjet printer. Right, they're going to these photo finishers right.
Gary Pageau:Yeah, I think that's one of the things is where I think a lot of people expected, you know, home printing, you know, I'm going back a long time, let's say 20 years and people really expected, like, the home inkjet printer to kind of take up that volume of what people were printing at retail. And I just I don't whether it was a technology, whether it was price, whether it was convenience, whatever. You know, people still print at home, but it's certainly not what people are going to be doing at retail I mean, when's the last time you've heard somebody who's not in the industry be pleased with their inkjet printer?
Jeffrey Huang:they're they're expensive the ink is expensive they're fiddly technology, that when you don't print for a couple months which happens in home printing right you? You suddenly want something printed, but then you go weeks or months without printing.
Jeffrey Huang:Right, then your printer is all working because it's clogged up yeah I don't want an inkjet printer in my house and none of my friends do. That's sort of indication to me that people don't like to keep a printer in their house because it's extra electronics that they have to maintain. And they have an ipad, they have a phone, they have a computer they've got all the stuff. Yeah, some people might still keep it for work.
Gary Pageau:But if you have a home office, it makes sense. I mean that's, you know, yeah, yeah, print from printing pictures on a just a normal consumer grade inkjet printer. You know one you get for 99 bucks at office depot or someplace. That's an arduous process, it's, it's, it's a challenge, but I mean for home office, you know, I, I think it's, you know, a great solution I got when I print papers, because I'm old and I still print things but you know, for photos specifically, yeah, um, people are aiming for a high quality print, right, and you're not getting that for 99 bucks.
Gary Pageau:You're getting from 199 well, plus, you're dealing with different media too. People got to deal with, you know, with the nikjet. If you're using it for home office, you've got your normal bond paper in, but then, oh wait, I want to print some photos. I got to switch out the printer, I mean, I got to switch out the paper and then I have to, you know, put it into photo mode. And you know, you have to do all these extra steps as opposed to just pressing a button and printing.
Jeffrey Huang:You know steps, as opposed to just pressing a button and printing. You know exactly, and you know these retailers like walgreens, to make it so easy. You go in, right, you have your photos on on your phone. It comes out within 20 minutes. You're just, you're off to buy some drinks and some doritos and then you get your photo right listen, I think their whole business model is drinks, doritos and prints.
Gary Pageau:That's their whole business model.
Jeffrey Huang:When's the last?
Jeffrey Huang:time you saw anybody buy medicine at Walgreens. It's a business model that works and it's convenient. That's why people like it. The sort of online photo delivery thing is also extremely large. We see Walmart, walgreensreens and the retailers in europe. They're also doing that. They all sure they gather your orders online and then they'll send it to you or they'll send it to one of their locations. And it's great when they send it to one of their locations because, like, it's no cost to them, it's just electronics yeah, so.
Gary Pageau:Are many of your customers using your product for like photo gifting, for, you know, transferring to like mugs or things like that, or are you just not set up for that?
Jeffrey Huang:We don't do any of that. So we only do direct to card and photos. We don't do t-shirts, mugs or anything. That's a related technology, right.
Gary Pageau:That's why I asked, because I know it's like a second cousin to what you're doing.
Jeffrey Huang:I asked because I know it's like a second cousin to what you're doing, but I wondered if you guys are looking at that as a platform, because that is also a growing part of the market is taking those Daiso prints and then transferring them to other media. This is not part of a company policy, but just personally. I really like that sector and I really want to make more in that sector.
Jeffrey Huang:But we'll see what we do. We're a relatively small company so we can develop one product at a time. So we're focusing on the photo and the card printer market at the moment, but it's a very interesting market. People love customized stuff and know that there are some people who they buy a t-shirt printer and a mug printer and that's their business. Then they're working for themselves and they love it yeah, yeah.
Gary Pageau:So where can people go for more information about your company and the products? Because, like I said, you have distributors around the world. How would they find how to contact those and where can they find your company?
Jeffrey Huang:So our website is HITIcom H-I-T-Icom. We also have a couple of social media accounts spread here and there. We're not very active on them, to be honest. I think LinkedIn we're starting to pick up. We have distributors all over the US ImageTech, imaging Spectrum, southtrend, nova Graphics, buffalo, et cetera, et cetera. If you go to B&H or Adorama or Unique Photo, you'll see our products there. Our products are on Amazon, obviously. Check out our website, check out our distributors. Our new printer is coming very, very soon and we think it's a very good fit for the markets of your industry. Check it out.
Gary Pageau:Yep, definitely Awesome. Well, thanks, jeff, for your time. Appreciate getting to know you better and more about the company. I always love it when I run across somebody who has been in the industry a long time but they're still innovating, doing different things, trying to grow the market.
Erin Manning:So thank you so much. Thank you so much, Gary. It's always a pleasure to talk to you and I hope we can do this again. Thank you for listening to the Dead Pixels Society podcast. Read more great stories and sign up for the newsletter at wwwthedeadpixelssocietycom.
