Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2003/10/02

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Subject: RE: [Leica] Kodak Focus
From: Tim Atherton <tim@KairosPhoto.com>
Date: Thu, 02 Oct 2003 13:50:33 -0600

> Yes, you can get excellent digital images; but you've got to work
> for them
> and know your onions. You can't depend on some commercial outfit
> to do quality
> mass printing for you.

You never could. As before, this depends as much on the operator as the
equipment - there were bad consumer labs and good ones. You always had to
find a good lab - even for you holiday - we used to have two labs in town +
Walmart - only one out of the three was ever any good. You could have shot
the same scene on three cameras dropped the rolls off and got one very nice
set back and two poorly processed and corrected sets back. Now it's one
decent lab and Walmart - and the walmart is still crap.

 >We've been spoiled by the latest
> innovations in film
> camera and processing technology. My sister, who knows nothing
> about photography,
> shoots a roll of Kodaclolor in her automatic P&S and has it processed at
> supermarket and back comes many fine prints in duplicate,

My neighbour does exactly the same with our one remaining small town
photolab - only she drops off a card of digital files. The labs workflow is
now digital - the same folks that used to produce very nice consumer 4x6's
now produce equally as good digital 4x6's from either a digital or film
original - actually, quite often better because the digital lab machines
offer them more flexibility.

> In a few years digital might reach that point, but until then
> digital is a
> labor intensive methodology if you want to get excellent prints.

Wrong - it's here right now, in (many) a small town lab - same price as
before - as good as or better than before prints.


tim

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