Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2004/02/05
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]When I am not lurking around the LUG, scanning negs and posting to my website, I earn my film and lens money working as an account rep. for a large commercial printer in Canada. Rubens posting earlier was quite correct. Printing as a duotone will greatly enhance image tonal range. You can do this either as a two blacks, one black and a Pantone grey, or a variety of other mixes to achieve results. It is more expensive, as the prepress, proofing, plate count and makeready all increase. Our plant prints using a Stochastic dot, 10 micron in size. This is instead of the standard 45-degree haftone, 150 or 175 lpi. Quite a few commercial printers are using 20 micron, which gives an equivalent of ~350 line screen. Our 10 micron is more like ~650 line screens. Put a lupe on these images and you cannot see the halftone dot. The other key about costing is the more images printed at once, the lower the effective unit cost. Set up, prepress, proofing etc are a large component to getting presses running in small runs, and the paper and incremental running time is relatively inexpensive. If several LUG members joined forces, you would get a much better effective unit cost. jm - -- To unsubscribe, see http://mejac.palo-alto.ca.us/leica-users/unsub.html