DRY LAB - AN IDEA WHOSE TIME HAS COME?

• DRY LAB – An Idea Whose Time Has Come? – Those who went to FOCUS on Imaging from the photo lab sector this year probably noticed new dry labs being offered by Fujifilm, Kodak, KIS/PhotoMe and Noritsu. The Fujifilm and Noritsu offerings are (hardware identical) inkjet systems, but the Kodak combo is primarily thermal (conceptually similar to the Mitsubishi Flexilab package, available here for some years already). And that prompts PhotoWeek! to ask this question, Just what is a dry lab anyway? [expand story >>>]

Conceptually, dry labs need to be a superior substitute for current minilabs. Brand manufacturers strive to present them as exactly that. Fujifilm are marketing their Dry Lab 400 as just another member of the venerable Frontier family. To be a dry lab, any solution has to aim to be functionally equivalent to a minilab, and needs to represent a similar economic proposition. Minilab buyers are resistant to dry labs that can't approach the cost-per-print of wet labs.

But are dry labs really so certainly the heirs-in-waiting to the minilab inheritance, or is the whole concept of a minilab redundant in future photofinishing? Can we predict with confidence how long consumers are going to continue to get 4"x6" prints from retail outlets – for another decade, for longer?

Dry lab is a concept that predates the digital revolution. The original promise of dry lab for the manufacturers was that it would enable minilab sales to penetrate even further into the retail market – back in the days when expansion was impeded only by resistance to wet process! But minilabs are rolling back out of retail anyway, and it's not because of chemistry. With the new economics of declined print volumes, retail can't afford to give minilabs their floor space anymore. ASDA has had to replace some of their in-store photo labs with kiosks, for example. But even kiosks may be just a transitional technology, with the consumer ultimately returning to home printing.

There's another possibility. The small-footprint machines that could replace wet labs may have already crept into photo shops without us recognizing them. Minilabs these days are for doing work in small batches, run every half-hour or hour. Given the right software, this kind of work can be layed up on the wide-format inkjets that most photo labs already have. Schools photographers work this way now, using RIP facilities to output whole jobs on wide-format. In some ways, the right software RIP can enhance an inkjet so much the RIP could be considered a 'soft' minilab! So ponder this – future 'minilabs' may be neither wet nor dry, they might just be soft!

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