Brands Australia’s new ID Station ‘Biometrics in a Box’ generates a ‘compliance certificate’ which verifies that the passport photo complies with International Civil Aviation Organization standards.
Machine readable passports have now becoming the standard, and as more airports adopting the new technology, compliance has become more critical than ever.
The certificate – a 6×4-inch photographic print which overlays the ICAO standards onto a copy of the passport image and gives a readout of various measures – should play a useful role in reassuring customers and post office and immigration officials that the passport photo is ‘fit for purpose’. Instances where the local post office rejects the passport photo, leading to unneccesary remakes, will be reduced.
With many post offices entering the passport photo business themselves, there is perhaps an incentive to assess a local competitor’s work overly harshly.
‘ The APO shouldn’t reject the image with the compliance certificate,’ said John Rule. ‘Naturally, we can’t control what an individual post site staff will do, or be accountable for their actions.
‘We have strong ties to the government authorities and raise any customer and industry issues for investigation as needed, and on a case by case basis,’ he said.
He added that there was a lot of recent activity among Licensed Post Offices in the area of passport photos.
For example, Au Passport Photo, headed by John Ackield (formerly Australian Photographic Engineering) has installed hundreds of its ‘One Shot’ passport systems to post offices, as well as pharmacies and travel agents around Australia, on a no upfront cost/profit sharing basis.
JA Davey has also entered the passport/ID business, having announced the July launch of the DNP DS-ID400 Passport ID photo solution, based on proven Sony dye-sub-based digital passport and ID imaging technology, combined wirelessly with a high-end Canon camera.
The DNP system is built around the DNP DS ID-400 dye transfer printer (DNP has acquired Sony’s dye tranfer print technology). The ID400 features convenient wireless operation, and a 60-second print production cycle. It has state-of-the-art face-detection and automatic face alignment.
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