Shutterfly operates the world's largest digital labs for on-demand printing and is the largest customer of HP digital presses, according to the company. Its plant hums with human activity and the sounds of machine parts spitting out, slicing, and punching pages.
Silver halide printing hasn't changed much in a century, but digital printing has only been around for half a decade--seen by Shutterfly as an opportunity for tinkering. Its founders used their Hollywood backgrounds in 3D animation to optimize the way things were done digitally.
Shutterfly uses 30 types of machines from a variety of manufacturers. It removes each vendor's preinstalled software and loads its own applications on the equipment. This enables Shutterfly to make use of its proprietary color-matching technology and other efficiency innovations. The company has issued 21 patents, with 30 more pending.
Photo prints are seen here rolling off of machines. Cheese-wheel-size spools of picture postcards get fed into machines that detect each border via a digital code, then slice. Greeting cards take less than a day to produce.
Photo by Shutterfly
