Optical Printing

Can any old timers here tell comment about the quality of optical prints? I

mean, when they were good, were they really great? I know how sharp and clear

(and large) projected slides are, and imagine optical printing gave that

possibility. Were the larger print sizes, say 16x20 or 20x30 very sharp?

Also, I assume it was also much easier for careless operators to give you

unfocussed, poor results. What was the potential like of optical prints?

We still have an optical printer in our lab. And to be honest it gets basically no use at all. Our digital printer trumps it in quality. I know some people on here might get upset me saying that, but our digital Noristu consistently puts out better prints then our optical Noritsu. Optical prints can be almost as sharp, and the colors less bold then digital prints. I only print my medium format optically since that format has the extra rez to produce good optical prints.

Optical prints will show the grain pattern of the film used. Digital prints will show the pattern of the digital printer. You can get good results either way and digital printing gives you much more control over color and contrast but I still like optical prints if we are talking about enlargements and if the printing is being done from color negatives. It isn't easy to find Type R prints now so I get slides scanned and printed digitally.

I'm not an expert or old timer, but I recently experimented with printing 8x10 enlargements from a color negative. I instructed a local lab to enlarge by scanning and by optical means. The end result was that the optical enlargement showed smoother skin tones while the scanned enlargement had truer colors. Otherwise I didn't see much difference. The grain was similar and the sharpness was similar. Obviously your results will vary with the skill of the technician. It would interesting to see optical enlargements larger than 8x10 but the lab I used wasn't equipped for that. For my purposes, a good scan with good quality printing works very well.

Optical prints us a light source to burn the image of the negative into the photo paper. Digital prints use a laser to burn the scan of the negative into the photo paper. Both will show the grain. If you are using ink jet printing, that is a different story.

I print B&W with an enlarger - a good 4x5 negative can easily enlarge to 20x24 with stunning results. But this is custom work with excellent negs (zone system) - you won't get the same results from machine prints.

 

I'm now taking a color workshop - enlarger and changing filters to get the color balance that I want. It's fun, but I plan to scan my color film (Nikon Coolscan 9000) and print digitally. It's faster and easier to adjust colors on the computer - and I don't have to wait 5 minutes for each test print to develop.

small prints, I like optical better as I look at proofs with a loup to see which one is the truely sharp one and which one's aren't for potential enlargements. Large prints, digital....definitly I dont have a set up to make prints, but I do have a film scanner, and when I print from my scanned negs I've been satisfied wiht sharpness/color and density where as what has come back to me from both fuji and qualex after having been optically enlarged is dissapointing.

People are confusing "optical prints" with "optical printer."

 

Some sort of "optical printer" (eg Pako, Noritsu) was standard for proof printing, wedding packages etc, as well as for minilabs until recently. They don't show grain primarily because of small print size and because few want to see grain.

 

Typical optical printers certainly *could* show grain in larger prints if they had proper optics, and if the lab wanted that result.

 

High resolution (eg Nikon) scans and average-good inkjet printers DO show grain (or color film dye clouds), and not just ink dots, if the prints are large enough. Fast 35 B&W may show grain handsomely in inkjet at 11X17.

 

Fuji and Qualex are both snapshot labs. They don't seek enlarging sharpness potential as they don't use condenser enlargers. Similarly, their customers want "acceptable" color and rarely think in terms of density.

I think optical prints have a different "look" to digital prints, but the difference is minor. Most will prefer the digital prints as they are generally sharper and have more colour saturation (all of which can be adjusted digitally of course). But subtle graduations and skin tones sometimes look better on optical prints. The benefit of digital is that you have more control over how the image appears.

I think it is a moot point as optical colour printing is essentially extinct. However from my experience of optical colour prints, which is from family prints from the 70s, 80s and early 90s, I have found them inferior to their modern equivalents and to modern reprints from the same negs. I know the colour gamut of papers in the past was not as good, but they often had strange colour casts which are easily and automatically removed in a digital lab.

 

My question is, was it a slow and laborious process? A modern digital minilab is able to scan a film in less than a minute and print up to about 1800 photos per hour. From start to finish it is possible to develop, scan and print a film in about 15 minutes with a Fuji Frontier 570 or 590.

I presume you're talking about optical colour prints rather than B&W since you can still buy the latter.

 

I used to have R types produced by a succession of top-end London labs. Rarely did I have a larger print (say 18" sq or bigger from a MF original) that I was completely happy with. Sharpness on the print was an issue especially at the edges. Detail, when very light or dark was hard to get, and it wasn't easy to match colours and contrast particularly well to the original. Then when you got a great one, getting a few more the same was an issue. I would not make 20 x 30 prints as they weren't good enough IMO

 

Moving to drum scan/high end digital prints on Crystal Archive in 2000 resolved most- maybe all- of those issues though at a cost. The other day I made myself make an inventory of my larger colour prints abd that gave me the opportunity I don't normally take to compare R Type and digital approaches. I reckon that in 70% of cases I preferred the digital prints outright, but in the other 30% I could always specify how I'd now do it differently to match or beat the best optical version. There were no optical prints that I thought could not be equalled or beaten by a good scan and printing on a LightJet or Chromira. I now feel comfortable with making prints up to 36" sq from the same originals.

 

I don't think that the digital prints I have made and R types have a fundementally different look. Thats helped by the printers/papers I choose and I may not have said the same if I'd used inkjets (though these have improved massively since I started using digital prints). What can make digital prints look different is what you can do with the file before printing. Its easy to reduce the contrast to make it print easily but look "dead". Its easy to get too much sharpness front to back which can look unnatural in a landscape. None of these things is inevitable but its just as always- choosing the best process is important, but choosing the right people to carry out that process is more so.