Labs with NON-INKJET prints?

Do it yourself. GraLab timer or egg timer, Nikor tanks/reels, bathtub for temp stability, black tape etc to make bathroom into darkroom. I did it so anybody who actually cares can do it.

ChristopherCoy said:

Which labs are still processing film and providing true color prints? I absolutely do not wants scans and inkjet prints. I want true 4x6 color prints.

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if you found a roll easel you could put it under your enlarger and set up for 4 x 6 inch size, We did this quite easily , the trick would be to process the roll, there are a lot of table top processors out there that could be had for
a decent price... Now that is old school, we use to have multiple window easels to gang up more than one image at a time.

Bob Carnie said:

We had this exact printer in the Wedding Studio I worked at in the late 70;s It was awesome device for proofing 5 inch rolls for proofs. We hand printed on a enlarger the wedding albums. The paper was loaded into the back and as Ian says fixed focus lenses, I believe we had a few settings for different magnifications , no dodge no burn, just plain out exposing and balancing out the colour. When you finished you turned out the lights, open the back cut the paper and Bag it to the processor which was in our case a Kodak 20 inch colour processor.

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One of the last times I went to my local pro lab Terry the owner had just put some 5x4 Durst enlargers in a skip to go to land fill, unfortunately most items had been damaged badly, I salvaged a colour head and posted it here, you contacted me about it Bob but shipping would have been more than it was worth. That day Terry gave me two turrets full of Durst Componon and Componon S lenses, every lens had a grub screw locking the aperture scale, there were like top hat spacers so you might have 2 105mm Componon lenses a different distance s from the film, so closer to the paper for smaller enlargements.

One point Terry made was that for consistency to maintain the colour balance, contrast, and density etc it was important to ensure the same exposure time for different sized prints off the same negative. At that time pro-labs always gave you a slip of paper with the filtration and exposure time for each negative and valued customers usually had their work printed by the same person, particularly when it came to hand printing.

It wasn't uncommon with older roll-head printers for colour negatives to be analysed n a separate machine for colour balance and exposure time, again the details printed on a slip of paper then dialled in by the roll head printer operator, I'm fairly sure Terry's lab was like the early 1980's.

Ian

The Durst mini-printer I worked on actually had an automatic exposure and colour balancing function built in. It also had a mode that produced a test strip for each print - a slanted excerpt of the image about one inch wide, and the width of the paper.
I would go into the darkroom and access the dark side of the machine to set the lenses on the machine for 5" wide proofs, load the 5" roll of paper in and put in the test strip mask, which automatically set the paper advance. I would then go back out to the light and take an uncut roll of exposed film (or 20 of them!) and run it through the printer in test print mode. Film "advance" was by hand, and all exposure and colour balance over-rides were zeroed.
I would then go back into the dark, cut the exposed part of the paper and walk over to the intake on the Kreonite (IIRC) paper processor.
The processed strip of paper came out of the processor on to a roll takeup. That roll was cut into segments, with each segment matching up with its associated roll of film.
Then, with grease pencil in hand, I would review the strips and mark right on to the strips themselves the corrections necessary with respect to exposure and colour. IIRC, the corrections were done by adjusting Red, Blue and Green settings on the printer.
With the annotated test strips and roll of film in hand, I would then go back into the darkroom, take out the test strip mask and insert the full size proof mask. Most frequently that was a 5"x5" mask, although we did have masks and lens settings for 4"x5" proofs from 6x4.5 and 6x7 negatives.
I would then go back out to the light side and feed the roll through again. This time though I would apply the corrections I had marked on each of the test strips to the corresponding negatives. The corrections were applied to the exposures determined by the automatic functions built into the machine.
After doing all that, I'd go back into the dark and feed the exposed paper into the processor.
At the end, the proof prints were cut into individual proofs, and the sleeved and rolled up rolls would accompany them and the annotated test strips in the envelope that went back to the customer.
I also used the machine to make machine enlargements, where cropping was standardized, but we didn't employ the cardboard masks that other labs used at the time.
I wonder how long it would take me now to determine the required colour and density corrections for 20 rolls of wedding or portrait photography?

Very similar story with the labs I've worked at ( ... though I was never a machine printer ).

They used Durst, Buick and De Vere mini-printers running 285ft rolls of 4" to 12" wide paper, which exposed RGB ( auto exposure integrating to grey ).
Results were pretty close to final grade. As Matt says, test strips were made until finals.
The machines could also print in 'fixed-filtration' mode ( manual colour balance ).

Processing was on Pro-Pak, San-Marco and Kreonite roller transport and leader belt processors.

I have to say, 'machine prints' produced back then were far better quality than the inkjet outputs I see produced today !
Inkjet printers may be convenient operationally and business-wise ( I totally get it ), but their quality simply doesn't compare with real RA-4 photographic prints where optical printers ( and enlargers ) are used.

John S

From memory Matt that's what my local lab did for wedding/portrait photographers. I suspect Terry the owner started with second hand Durst roll head printers because he'd been a Durst engineer and could get them cheap, he'd managed a satellite lab for 2 or 3 years for one of the UK's largest mostly mail order pro-labs, the satellite labs only did C41 and RA-4 prints the E6 went to their main lab and possibly any LF C41, however most LF colour work was always E6 anyway.

Ian

Ian - I was the custom printer at a big wedding lab in Toronto... my job was to do the enlargement custom prints for framing in each wedding package. I got the work first before the Candid ( machine print people) my priority was to set the colour balance for the wedding package from the start. I would get my jobs each day and use a VCNA to balance in each negative ... density Yellow Magenta... numbers , while I was doing this I would calibrate the translator that was in my room that had a probe to read the colour light from the VCNA slip. We got very , very , good at this and this balance was done each and every day . basically to calibrate against chemistry drift and bulb drift. If you were good on the VCNA the colour was perfect. We used a roll easel and did 6 x 18 inch test strips not density step offs but just a full strip, usually we were within 3 points of correct colour and density which was a breeze to correct from.. I was and still would be in the habit of having a full colour ringaround mounted in the correction area to qualify my corrections , I always felt this was very important and was a fantastic teaching tool for new printers getting use to colour correcting their own work.

"True color" optical prints are hard to find. An RA4 print may be "non-inkjet", but those know more may correct me. Most RA4 prints made today may be printed digitally because it's cheaper and faster. Most color negs are scanned, then the print is exposed with a film recorder like device. Balancing color prints optically is a lot of work with different color negative emulsions and variances in RA4 paper emulsions. This might make true optical prints not cost competitive with digitally made RA4 prints.

Mainecoonmaniac said:

An RA4 print may be "non-inkjet"

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An RA4 is non-inkjet by definition, yes.

koraks said:

An RA4 is non-inkjet by definition, yes.

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I have scanned negatives and uploaded them to get 4x6 prints; nothing fancy, just snapshots. Perhaps it's a matter of taste, but even from home-scanned negatives I prefer RA4 prints. One place I used had switched to inkjet. They just don't look right to me... and don't get me started on how they feel, lol.

I've a cheap color enlarger now... I just have to get around to using it.

It’s pretty interesting reading how it used to be done. Nowadays, us younger whipper snappers just don’t do it that way, for better or worse, usually worse, depending on who you talk to, though I have plenty of people who use my services who are plenty happy with inkjet prints. Newer inkjet printers have come a long way, so if you seen a print from a newer machine recently, you might be in for a pleasant surprise. Assuming the scan of the film is good to begin with.

Adrian Bacon said:

It’s pretty interesting reading how it used to be done. Nowadays, us younger whipper snappers just don’t do it that way, for better or worse, usually worse, depending on who you talk to, though I have plenty of people who use my services who are plenty happy with inkjet prints. Newer inkjet printers have come a long way, so if you seen a print from a newer machine recently, you might be in for a pleasant surprise. Assuming the scan of the film is good to begin with.

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+1.

Last October I got a chance to use a demo Fuji Frontier DL650 (in the Fujifilm Ireland office) which is an inkjet lab printer. I ran off a set of prints, 6x4, 6x8, 10x8 and compared them to a set I had run off my own Frontier LP7700 RA4 printer.

On the inspection table, side by side, they looked the same. If you were to do "the three card trick" with them then I wouldn't have known which was which. Of course when you feel them, then it's a different matter BUT the customer doesn't notice (I tried it).

I think the biggest problem with the perception of digital prints (RA4 or inkjet) is that the software can be misused, adding extra contrast, saturation, colour balance, sharpness etc when it is not needed. I sometimes think it is a bit like the super enhanced HD digital images craze we saw a few years ago, a case of " I will do because I can" instead of just leaving it alone.

I remember having young new film customers and they commented that they prefered the muted colours of film compared to the garish colours of digital. (this is not a slag on digital).

One of the labs I used to have print for me from scans used to print on RA-4, and used to make really good prints from digital files. They had stopped developing or printing from film a couple of years before I started to use them, but they still had experienced staff that new how to print well from scans.
One of the major motivators for their switching to inkjet printing was the much reduced electricity costs. As a matter of practicality, it makes sense to keep an RA-4 machine at temperature 24 hours a day, and that costs money.
When they switched over, they waxed eloquently about the potential for wider gamut, and the ease of just switching on the printer in the morning, without need to run control strips or any of the other process monitoring steps.
I didn't like their new prints, so went elsewhere.
I did stop in from time to time though. After about a year, they revealed that their expected savings on electricity costs were more than offset by their costs relating to software and hardware support.

MattKing said:

One of the labs I used to have print for me from scans used to print on RA-4, and used to make really good prints from digital files. They had stopped developing or printing from film a couple of years before I started to use them, but they still had experienced staff that new how to print well from scans.
One of the major motivators for their switching to inkjet printing was the much reduced electricity costs. As a matter of practicality, it makes sense to keep an RA-4 machine at temperature 24 hours a day, and that costs money.
When they switched over, they waxed eloquently about the potential for wider gamut, and the ease of just switching on the printer in the morning, without need to run control strips or any of the other process monitoring steps.
I didn't like their new prints, so went elsewhere.
I did stop in from time to time though. After about a year, they revealed that their expected savings on electricity costs were more than offset by their costs relating to software and hardware support.

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lol.... yeah, you have to factor in total cost of ownership correctly. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t worth it to switch, as they could have other benefits, just the “cost savings” wasn’t a benefit. For somebody just starting up, going the RA-4 route IS very cost prohibitive, and you can get into an inkjet system that does up to 16x20 prints very nicely for significantly less money.

Adrian Bacon said:

lol.... yeah, you have to factor in total cost of ownership correctly. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t worth it to switch, as they could have other benefits, just the “cost savings” wasn’t a benefit. For somebody just starting up, going the RA-4 route IS very cost prohibitive, and you can get into an inkjet system that does up to 16x20 prints very nicely for significantly less money.

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Their printers - both old and new - were/are mini-lab machines.
One needs to pay really close attention to the wording of the support contracts for machines like that!
Do you use a machine like that Adrian?

MattKing said:

Their printers - both old and new - were/are mini-lab machines.
One needs to pay really close attention to the wording of the support contracts for machines like that!
Do you use a machine like that Adrian?

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no. I use a Canon Pro-1000. It’s a pigment printer. It takes up to 17x25 paper, but I primarily print a max of 16x20. I offer two types of prints, standard RC prints on Canon’s Pro Luster paper, and archival prints on Hahnemühle FineArt Baryta Satin paper, which looks gorgeous.