optical printing at labs

[vaantique]

I was wondering if anyone knows what kind of machines Costco and York photo use for printing. I was planning on

what lab to use for Ektar when I get some. I would like to use a lab that does printing directly from the

negative to retain as much detail and minimize any color problems or other issues from having the film scanned

then digitally printed.

Maybe I'm just being a little obsessive, but I'd like to get the full effect of this film.

[kyle_mahaney]

Costco uses Noritsu's and York goes to District Photo which is quite an awful lab. Don't bother with optical printing, go to a prolab that uses a Noritsu and prints on Kodak Endura paper for Ektar 100

[patrick_mont]

Dale Labs (Dalelabs.com) still offers optical printing. If you go to their website and request some of their mailers, the service right on the mailers is optical. However, their Pro-Proofing service (which is found on a big blue and white paper that comes with the mailers) is digital and printed on Endura. Their optical is printed on Ektacolor. I hope this helps. It is worth giving them a try. Since my local lab closed I have sent all of my work to them for their ProProofing (digital) service and I have been pretty happy.

[alexander_ghaffari]

@Les:

 

You received internagatives with your order? I would have assumed that they would scan and print digitally onto photo paper with lasers or whatnot. I would like to find a place that uses internegatives, but it has become uncommon since most, if not all, color internegative stocks have been discontinued. As a matter of fact, I would like to find some fresh color internegative film for my color enlarger.

[john_shriver]

Really rare to find serious optical color printing. Digital printing doesn't suffer from blurry corners, and the color management is infinitely easier. The near total shift to digital printing is causing the demise of products designed for optical printing. (The products for direct reversal printing from slides are all gone, with the exception of Ilfochrome.)

 

Kodak is dropping the papers designed for optical printing anyway, Portra Endura is gone, which was the normal contrast and saturation paper. There's Supra Endura, which is wide gamut, but they appear to be trying to migrate users to Supra Endura VC, which is for digital exposure systems only. (It does not have the curve offset designed for printing from orange-masked negatives.) There's still Ultra Endura, but that's really high saturation.

 

Both the Noritsu LED exposure system, and the Fuji Frontier laser exposure system, are very capable indeed. The limitation is the cheap high-throughput scanner normally coupled with them.

[john_castronovo]

Gee, there hasn't been internegative film on the planet for many years let alone anyone who knows enough to make

a decent one. Also, the stuff never lasted more than a few months no matter how it was kept. Only a handful of

labs ever had technicians who were able to expose interneg film correctly back in the days when it was a staple

service of custom labs, so especially now I wouldn't trust anyone who offered to make one.

 

As for optical printing directly from original negatives, however, there are many labs (including my own) that

still have enlargers and will use them for the purpose. Not everything is scanned and digitally printed here, but

with the exception of Ilfochromes, there's no alternative when printing from transparencies any more.