Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2003/09/21

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Subject: Re: [Leica] Now Departing...Your Favorite Specialty Camera Store
From: Rolfe Tessem <rolfe@ldp.com>
Date: Sun, 21 Sep 2003 21:28:28 -0400
References: <Pine.LNX.4.44.0309211703390.15119-100000@grace.speakeasy.net>

Ken Firestone wrote:

> On Sat, 20 Sep 2003, Rolfe Tessem wrote:
> 
>    Don Dory wrote:
>    
>    I would say the biggest problem for a traditional lab is that the 
>    drugstores and Walmarts and Costcos now have the same equipment as the 
>    pro labs do, and it becomes increasingly hard for the pro labs to 
>    justify the higher margins. I'm talking about printers here, not dip and 
>    dunk versus roller processors.
>    
> But hopefully the pro labs won't wipe the floor with your film like
> Costco does when they get overwhelmed with customers.   

Ken,

If you read the last line of my post, I said I was talking about 
printers, not film processors. I agree that film processing at these 
mass market outlets is problematic.

The fact is, the Fuji Frontier is a wonderful printer. Many pro labs 
have installed them and many Walmarts and drugstores have installed 
them. If you have a good end-to-end color managed workflow, you can get 
prints of equal quality from the Walmart Frontier as those from the pro 
lab. It takes some work, as you have to convince the Walmart employee to 
enable "no corrections" on the printer, but if you can do that, the 
results are absolutely equal. My own experience is that if the store has 
a kiosk, that station sends the files to the printer with no corrections 
enabled, so it is the best "no brainer" solution.

My point is that this is actually a significant development in the 
photofinishing world and one that is worth taking advantage of.

Rolfe

- -- 
Rolfe Tessem      |     Lucky Duck Productions, Inc.
rolfe@ldp.com     |     96 Morton Street
(212) 463-0029    |     New York, Ny 10014

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In reply to: Message from Ken Firestone <kenf@speakeasy.net> (Re: [Leica] Now Departing...Your Favorite Specialty Camera Store)