Camera phone printing standard

Confirming my ongoing suspicion that cellcams are about to go big, Canon, Seiko Epson, and HP have announced they are forming a consortium to create a standard for printing photos directly from cellcams.

Together, these three manufacture the vast majority of the world’s consumer printers. It’s a fairly safe bet that their new consortium, MIPC, will succeed. If it does, what then?

It may be a while before cellcam prints approach the quality of dedicated digicam prints, but one way or another, approach them they will. And with the “back pressure” MIPC will be indirectly putting on the cellcam makers to provide even higher quality image capture, things could get very interesting, very quickly. HP and Canon’s printer divisions may love this announcement, but I bet their digicam engineers are sweating a bit.