Photobooks and photo gifts in general have been on my mind of late. Earlier this month I ordered a personalised calendar for the first time, as an impromptu gift for my parents who'd found themselves uncharacteristically calendarless at the start of the year.

I purchased it through the Kodak Gallery as I've been using this site off and on to share photos for a couple of years, and as I was in a bit of a rush it seemed the most straightforward route.  All went smoothly with sticking my pics in to the template and I duly completed an order for the £15.99 ring-bound calendar Kodak offers.

The very next day I received an email from Aldi (yes, Aldi, one of those much-written about discount supermarkets) offering me a £2 discount on its calendars. Somewhat galling, but that's life. Checking out the Aldi range for future reference I see that while Kodak has just the one calendar format, the supermarket offers no fewer than eight different calendar styles. And of course this being Aldi the prices are keen, to say the least. A calendar a bit smaller than the Kodak one is half the price at £7.79, while a larger format still comes in at only £12.59. And that's prior to that £2 discount.  So a company that was once the doyenne of the photographic world is effectively being out-performed by a business founded on cheap bread and vegetables.

I guess my next task is to splash out on something from the Aldi range in order to see what the quality and service is like. The retailer uses Medion Electronics as its service provider, but I'm not convinced that Medion would do the actual printing. Something else to find out.

All this is noteworthy because suppliers of digital printing kit often laud photobooks and similar gifts as being the sort of lucrative market that their customers can make handsome profits from. Last autumn a study from Futuresource Consulting said the value of the photo merchandise market in Western Europe was €545m last year, a 44% leap, and predicted continued future growth. So it's a big business and one that is booming - for some. A simple Google search reveals a plethora of offerings and illustrates how highly competitive this space is, so having the right channel or partners is critical to success. In fact, could it be a market that's already over-supplied and subject to intense price pressure?

A timely illustration comes from the pages of the current issue of PrintWeek, where the joint administrators of Lanarkshire-based Alexander Kennedy & Sons are advertising the sale of its digital printing and film processing kit via an online auction.  This includes a HP Indigo 5500 that's nearly new, along with a two-year-old HP Indigo 5000. Various Fuji mini-labs, five Epson Stylus Pro 9800 printers, scanners, binding machines, mug and t-shirt transfer kit... in fact it's like a complete photo product business in a box. Could be a perfect opportunity for someone with the right go-to-market model. But it also shows that one man's boom is another's bust.