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Optical RA4 minilabs? Noritsu QSS

ericdan

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Feb 28, 2014
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1,359
Location
Tokyo
Format
35mm RF
Are there anymore minilabs offering optical RA4 prints rather than scanned RA4 prints?
I thought blue moon camera in Oregon did but can’t find anything on their website about it anymore.
I have my prints made by a place in Tokyo using the optical Noritsu machines and he was asking if there are other labs abroad that do the same. Guess he wants to connect with other labs for parts, repair etc.

Thanks!
 
An optical minilab machine would be very old by this stage.
Fuji introduced the Frontier digital lab in the late 1990s so optical labs were phased out after that (early 2000s). So if a lab still has a machine operating it is over 20 years old. Unless they had the machine refurbished, the max you can expect from these machines is 10-12 years (from the machinal side)
The software running the machine would probably be, at best, windows 95. (the frontiers ran windows 2000 for a long time.)
So in theory yes there could be a lab somewhere that can still operate an optical printer/minilab but in practice, I would say no.