Metallic paper RA4

[DREW WILEY]

Anything that can be printed on a LightJet or Lambda or Chromira or other expensive laser rig can be printed optically. Why some of these papers come with specific information in relation to these machines is simply because nowadays nearly all high-volume labs are working from a scan if films originals are involved, and that allows them to tweak the contrast and color balance and so forth in PS prior to printing. That's important because who the hell knows what kind of a mess of an original they'll have to work with, yet be expected to salvage to the customer's satisfaction! It also makes print size re-scaling easier. But for those of us who do this for personal reasons, and select and expose film with a specific paper in mind to begin with, along with optical enlargement, the whole workflow is potentially much easier. And if minor tweaks are needed, supplementary film masking is easy enough for those of us properly equipped to do so.

What also has to be kept in mind is that Fuji-Hunt is selling their chemicals primarily in relation to big RA4 replenishment systems directly attached to these laser printers, along with automatic lightproof XY paper roll cutting machines at the other end. And once in the processor, the time of development to stabilized output is fixed and relatively quick. The option of us small-volume users doing our processing one-shot in drums, even big drums, is not restricted by those same parameters. So we don't necessarily need their fancy-schmancy proprietary tweak of development chemistry. But they're in business to make money, so the small volume product needs of someone like me are like an annoying little aphid crawling on the back of an elephant.