Posts tagged digital photo

Recently, we reviewed the camera capabilities of the latest and greatest cell phones on the market. Whether you have the 5 megapixel camera onboard the Apple iPhone4 or the slick 12 megapixel cam on the Nokia N8, most people carrying current smartphones can snap photos in a flash at decent quality.

Most of the time, we email the photos right from the phone to friends. But there are times when the photos come out so nice or the event was extra special — so an emailed photo doesn’t really do justice to the memory captured with the cell phone camera.

I’m testing out a new service from CellPhonePostcards.com which creates photo postcards on the fly and mails them via snail mail to anyone in your address book online. Now, I should be able to send a physical postcard to anyone I take a photo with on the spot and they’ll get it within a couple of days — all without licking any stamps.

The service is actually pretty ingenious.  You take the photo, and then send the photo via text messaging (MMS) to the service at 77468 (it spells “PRINT” on the phone keypad) and include the hashtag shortcut of the person in your addressbook online, say #KENNY.

The service identifies you via your caller ID and then looks up the person’s address based on the hashtag name you sent.  They’ll print the text message message as the postcard message on the back and mail out the photo postcard to your recipient.

All this costs $0.99 per postcard.  Given the postage cost of the actual postcard stamp and the going rate for printing out regular photos at the local drugstore like CVS, that means the service costs less than 50 cents for each time you use it.  Totally reasonable in my book.  The only catch is that you have to pre-pay for bundles of cellphone postcard credits as a 10-pack or more.  So $9.90 for 10 postcards at a time.  Still, not a bad deal!

Here’s a video that explains the service and how to send a cellphone photo postcard:

UPDATE: Right now, if you sign-up for a new account, they’ll give you 10 free postcard credits – including postage – to try out the service. If you’re going to sign-up, please share a comment below about what you’re expecting or what you find useful or convenient about the service.