Originally Posted by
bob carnie
Labs that offer this printing are in most cases in very expensive areas of the world.
Metro - London , Picto - Paris , Lamount - New York, Duggal - New York.
I think this has to come into the equation, Also the work involved with this process is every bit as involved as silver printing by hand , but with the added steps of laser calibration, and Photo Shop work that if not done properly will create all kinds of problems.
For me scanning negs to print are the easiest to work with, getting raw files and converting myself is next. We do run into a lot of conversions that are basically crap and over the years have slowly tried to encourage this part of the workflow to be at least overseen by us.
I print inkjet, RA4 , enlarger fibre and lambda fibre and coming up with the results I like is most definately the hardest with Lambda Fibre.
I cannot speak for any other lab but for me the difficulty of making everything come out right on paper is why I charge the prices I do. It must be noted that my enlarger hand prints are about the same price and in the new year we are making adjustments in our pricing to equalize them.
CPrints off a lambda, chromira or lightjet is dead nut simple, fast and efficient , you will notice that I have spoken on this in past threads about murals from Chromira.
In Canada and parts of the States a ongoing price per foot is going on and it is because , the customers are becoming very digitally savvy and are able to image quite well without the labs technical knowledge and therefore only need us to ram the paper through the machine. There fore the lower costs.
For some reason imaging to Lambda fibre is harder and a premium is attached to do so.
Price per foot will never happen with wet fibre , at least not in my case , as dev, stop, fix, fix, wash , hypo clear wash, bleach sepia, selenium tone is part of the process and I cannot, or will not automate,
There also is the possibility of a group of like minded photographers , getting together and purchasing a Devere Digital Enlarger. They have been around for a few years, I think the price range is around 50k Canadian .
I have never seen output from this device so cannot comment on the quality vs Lambda.
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