Lowest price 30x40 chromira print?

[Nathan Potter]

I heard the other day that you can get a 30X40 at Costco for nine bucks- it's worth a try, especially since you can get a big hot dog and all the soda you care to drink for a buck fifty afterwards

What a deal! And if you spill some coke and mustard on the print you'll never notice it.

Nate Potter, Austin TX.

[thomasbg]

It seems I posted and never came back to look there were answers to my posting... :-( I was naive to expect I would be notified by mail, but it never came... So, I hope this is not breaking the rules here to mention business names (I saw many links posted in comments), our company name is Vertical-7 and we are located in Sofia, Bulgaria. Our machine is ZBE Chromira 50 and we can print anything up to that width. We use Fuji papers and have a fast FTP connection. The only problem is shipping...

You can contact me at thomas@vertinet.com, our web site is http://www.vertinet.com, but it's only in Bulgarian for the moment, so I doubt it will be of any help for the people from this forum...

And to whoever was opposing the idea of discussing better prices, I can tell that photography is really an art and you cannot put a price on art, but photographic printing is a craft and this means pricing not only can be discussed, but is an important production issue.

[Drew Wiley]

I have seen a couple of 30" Chromira rigs going for about 10% of their original price,
and a few decent or redonditioned 40" RA4 processors for about four grand apiece, which again is only about 10 or 20% of the original price. But even with bargains like
these and picking the machinery up yourself to save hundreds of dollars of freight,
it's just the tip of the iceberg. Getting the machines up and running and then maintained can easily cost you as much as the initial purchase. The dry to dry forty
inch roller processors, for example, typically require at least a 60-amp dedicated 240V
line - not exactly what you'd find in the avg personal darkroom. And frankly, I don't
know how long the Chromira machines will be servicable. This is hi-tech stuff originally
designed to be accompanied by an expensive service contract. When you start adding
up all the misc variables, you start understanding how much BS there is on a thread
like this one. Either be prepared for a serious industrial setup with the accompanying
headaches, or consign the work to someone like Bob who understands what he's doing.
The only other significant option is to build your own large drum processor.