24 hours to get more pleasure from photos.

Whether online, per order envelope or at a CEWE COLOR COMBINED PHOTO KIOSK: with CEWE COLOR, it will frequently take less than 24 hours from when you order your photos to their delivery. Our 12 European production plants receive orders several times a day.

Photo order envelopes are initially delivered to the modern sorting machines where information on the envelopes is automatically read: Is it a film or a data medium that needs to be developed? Which photo formats and types of print do customers want? Have CEWE PHOTO BOOK files been stored on the data medium? A fully automatic system then distributes the orders to the different production sections (digital photos, CEWE PHOTO BOOKS and photo gifts).

From a digital image to a photo
When digital photos are ordered, the data that has been read is forwarded direct to the printer. Up to 20,000 photos with image data are analysed every hour and their quality optimised before they are exposed onto photo paper. Each photo file is also converted into a small digital photo for the PhotoIndex, which, incidentally, is a CEWE COLOR invention.

In the next step the exposed photo paper is fed through a development bath (silver halide process) and is fixed and dried as a ready-processed film strip. The packing machine then cuts these film rolls up into individual photos. The identification number previously allocated at the splicer enables our employees to correctly place the data media, photos and PhotoIndex into the photo envelope belonging to the order.

The pricer finally prints the current price for each retail customer on the photo envelope.  Reading stations and feeding systems automatically sort the photo envelopes into each customer's compartment, pack them and load them. They are then very quickly delivered to customers by our delivery services.

The photo album of today: a CEWE PHOTO BOOK
Once they have been read, the photo book files are forwarded to highly modern printing machines (e.g. those from HP-Indigo, Kodak or Xerox). Up to 1,800 sheets of printing paper (four photo book pages each) can be printed by one single printer in an hour. The covers are also produced by these machines - thicker paper is used here.

Content and cover go separate ways after they have been printed: content pages make their way to the gluing station before moving on to the cutter. The cover is also cut and is then laminated and pasted onto cardboard to reinforce it. Finally the content pages and the relevant cover - each provided with a barcode - are brought together again.

Permanently monitoring the entire production process guarantees that each CEWE PHOTO BOOK meets the highest standards of quality. And this is rewarded by satisfied customers: last year alone we produced 4.3 million CEWE PHOTO BOOKS – more than anyone else.