what is the future of minilab?

Hello

 

just a question my friend :-)

For you, what is the future of digital minilab? Alwais chemical processing or

inkjet?

 

What do you think about?

 

Bye and good work :-)

 

Paolo

Frankly I don't know, but I hope chemical.

Many mini-labs do both chemical and inkjet prints - inkjet for prints wider than 8 inches. For a variety of reasons, inkjet prints tend to be custom, rather than mass, produced. They are also much more fragile than prints on Crystal C - sensitive to scratches, fingerprints and water.

 

The print making end will probably outlast the film processing end by decades, assuming that environmental concerns don't do to photography what they did to our heavy industry (and jobs).

Eventually we can expect mini-labs to dump wet processing all together and move to either ink-jet printing, or some type of technology yet to be determined.

 

The reasons are simple and obvious. With film sales diminishing, labs are going to start turning up their noses at C-41 processing, and RA-4 paper processing will logically follow. The additional labor, storage and safety concerns with conventional chemical processing are simply too great for modern labs to compete with.

 

RA4 digital printing has entrenched itself as a very high quality and popular process, but it can't hang on forever.

Frankly I don't give a hoot what kind of medium the labs use for printing, as long as there's someplace left running an E-6 and C-41 line with fresh chemicals. I'm a digital shooter, 1Ds-Mark2 and 5D, know CS2 inside and out, the whole nine yards, but I'd still hate to see the door closed on film as a photographic medium.

I can see E-6 at full service professional labs outlasting C-41 at amatuer ones.

Always chemical processing? Of course not but I doubt that inkjets will replace it. I lean toward Scott's statement of some future technology that may not have even been invented yet. There is a lot of R&D going into "electronic paper" but mostly as low quality newspaper replacement type stuff. Eventually that kind of stuff will get high quality and cheap enough that it will be everywhere.

Those little 4x6 print docks that come with some digicams I saw

on HSN showed one model where they dunked the print in all

types of solutions and rubbed it with their fingers without any

problems.

 

I don't know what printing technology they used-inkjet, dyesub or

lazer exposed silver halide, but that's got to be the best archival

quality I've come across. Maybe something of that type on a

larger scale might be in the future.

Will it last? Of course not! But I don't see it being replaced by inkjet any time soon as that

can't compete on price or speed right now. And I doubt it will catch up any time soon. (A

Frontier prints about 1500 6x4s an hour, I believe)

 

I can see inkjet creeping up quite soon on low-volume local drugstores, but at the high

capacity (online) operations, it just doesn't make sense.

Tim: those docks are (AFAIK) alway dye-sub, which is supposed to be pretty archival, but

expensive.

My office just leased a Minolta laser printer/copier for the network. does full color 8.5"x11" prints for $0.10, and B&W for $0.01, even on card stock. Image quality is good for a laser, but... Now if someone could get a similar system to make really good looking prints for the same price/convenience it would almost kill the chemical print industry. I don't doubt someone will eventually get this right.

I forsee.......the death of the c-41 film proscessor and something resebling a fuji frontier or noritsu 3011 or even agfa d-lab except minus the film scanner

<i>something resebling a fuji frontier or noritsu 3011 or even agfa d-lab except minus the film scanner</i><p>

 

That's already here, it's called a Fuji Pictograph. The processor and a computer and you're done. I've been using one for some of my prints for the last year, it's nothing new.

the pictography is in no way shape or form similar to the frontier other than files in photos out