Color Printing RA-4 Yes/No? How do folks print today

A few years ago I retired from a national high-volume lab that did school sports pictures (I was a color corrector). Although some of our products were ink-jet, the vast majority were RA-4 prints from large laser printers. These printers could crank out the high volume of prints necessary during our busy seasons--hundreds of prints of individual and team photos from digital files every day for our hundreds of clients from all over the country. We were just one lab of others like us across the country.

The RA-4 printers could expose the paper rapidly one print right after another, and send immediately to the processing tank. Each print (ranging in size from 3 1/2 x 5 to 8 x 12 inches) would come out of the machine--dry--within seconds of the last one. The ink-jet printers are so slow by comparison, I can't imagine the lab ever switching completely over to ink-jet, as it would take many times longer to get the hundreds of photos out, and probably a lot more expensive.

I see RA-4 being around quite a while!

MattKing said:

A lot of the production transfer had already happened prior to Covid. I don't know if anything was still being made in Colorado prior to the sale.
I don't know the answer to your question. All I know is that the disruption was profound, and if not catastrophic, as close as could be to that state.
It seems pretty clear though that the disruption caused the financial mess - not the other way around.
I wonder though whether the financial problem was contributed to as well by the Tetenal related financial problems visited on Kodak Alaris was dealing with prior to the sale. Prior to the bankruptcy/receivership/financial collapse of Tetenal, they were a major distributor of Kodak branded photo-finishing product in Europe. Who knows how much was owed to Kodak Alaris by Tetenal at the time of that collapse?

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My biggest concern is lost of technical "engineering and scientists" as well as the men and women who are manufacturing leads. For heritage Kodak products the pandemic and trade disruptions couldn't have come at a worse time.

RPC said:

The ink-jet printers are so slow by comparison

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You've never seen a parallel/'waterfall' head at work. They're still tiny now at around 20cm/8", but they can evidently be ganged together.
For high volume solutions, inkjet isn't going to be the technology that you have sitting on your desk. While production inkjet is slow today, don't assume it's going to stay that way.

They will have to speed up a LOT to compete with the lab printers, and be cheaper. RA-4 printers may speed up as well.

Are you familiar with Memjet heads?
Cheaper will be part of it. Safety concerns will be another; while drew seems to be bent on somehow painting inkjet as evil technology even though it doesn't (yet) have this track record, it doesn't remove the issue of chemical sensitization to especially RA4 developer, the issue of waste disposal etc. The point is, we're comparing one technology that has been around for decades and that has been largely optimized with another that's about 25-30 years old and essentially still in its youth phase. The opportunities for improvements across the board are more substantial in inkjet than in RA4. Sooner or later this is going to tip the balance.

I could say more, but frankly I'd rather not. I'd have to revisit a part of my career and the theoretical underpinnings it gave me to elaborate on the above and in all honesty, I left that field for a good reason - I was done with it, it bored the heck out of me and overall I'd rather spend my time working on more interesting things. I just have good reason to believe the future is with inkjet, but cannot and will not make a prediction when exactly that happens. Nobody can.

Yes, a tremendous amount of R&D has recently gone into improving inkjet technology, but there is also a fair amount of "good enough" plateauing at this point, requisite to turning a substantial profit on the extant versions of it, and recouping all the underlying R&D expense.
Things will keep on incrementally advancing; but anything really ahead of the pack would undermine what they're already doing. And let's face it, those inks and receiver papers have a horrendous profit margin built in, especially cumulatively, by the time they reach the retail level. Chromogenic RA4 color papers are a bargain by comparison, even with the chemistry factored in.

But at the same time, chromogenic printing has greatly improved due to its own ongoing evolution, especially with respect to permanence issues. And now people are able to apply advanced controls to that via PS etc just like they can for inkjet, although I personally prefer the all-optical true darkroom pathway. There's nothing better than real home cooking, although it's simply too slow for typical commercial operations.

Safety-wise and enviro disposal issues, per commercial applications, RA4 is a minor problem compared to when the T. Rex of Cibachrome stalked the earth. And all the pro lab output even then was flea-sized compared to what the military bases, shipping ports, paint factories, and oil refineries were doing around here. Now a major polluter is ironically the electronics tech industry itself, along with the pharmaceutical plants. Yeah, those places can be very safe inside, worker-wise, but their effluent going out is a different story, not to mention all the e-waste being generated as devices go obsolete at an absurdly rapid pace.