Unlike other EasyStart winners who submitted innovative ideas or inventions to the contest, industrial engineer Eyal Avisar, 29, came with a business idea.

His concept is aimed at restoring the lost glory - and profits - of photography stores now that digital cameras have made film developing and printing nearly absolute.

Avisar wants to build a business based on printers, imported from Europe, that print digital images on regular photographic paper.

Digital albums are everywhere these days. People take digital pictures and upload them to the Internet to share with family friends. Avisar's idea is to rescue the neighborhood photography store with printers that take digital images and make them into real photographic prints, not low-resolution printouts on ordinary paper.

Avisar has not yet begun importing the machines but he has obtained exclusive Israeli marketing rights to sell the printers, which are made in Spain, and the album binding materials, which are made in the Netherlands.

He sees his idea as an answer not only for the masses but also for the large organizations. "The police document everything and out-source their printing," Avisar says, and hospitals need a lot of image printing too. He claims that his in-house method will cut their costs from NIS 5 to NIS 8 per image, to NIS 3 to NIS 7. Even corner kiosks would be able to produce passport photos or to sell the album service he proposes - you bring the digital images, it prints them onto photo paper and binds the pages.

The pricea of the printers range from 1,700 to 2,000 euros each, but the real profit for Avisar is in the consumables, such as paper and ink. He'll be using his $100,000 loan to open an office, import the first machines and train a service technician. Avisar is confident: "What works in Europe will work here. It's just a matter of time."