PHOTO-PRINTING GURU AT SUMMER SHOW!

• Photo Printing Guru to Speak at Summer Show! –
Neil Taylor, the man behind minilabhelp.com, the outstandingly successful self-help Internet forum for photo labs, is expected to appear as guest speaker at the Fujifilm Wide Format and Canvas Printing Workshop being held at the www.photomart.co.uk SUMMER SHOW in London on 18 June. Neil, a highly experienced photo printer, will be telling wedding and portrait photographers why they shouldn't hold back any longer from doing some of their own printing in-house on wide format inkjets. [expand story >>>]

www.minilabhelp.com is run on a not-for-profit basis, as a service to the mini-lab community, by founder Neil Taylor. Neil is a former mini-lab owner who traded as BT Photographic. He was a good ambassador for the Noritsu corporation in that time, and sat on the PMA Photo Marketing Association's Minilab Advisory Panel. Since he started www.minilabhelp.com the site has grown into the main independent on-line forum for mini-lab folk. Neil will have a lot to share with photographers at the SUMMER SHOW about the practicality of doing enlargements and packages on inkjet solutions such as Fujifilm's GreenBox.

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PHOTO LABS TAKE TO QUICK PRINTING!

• Photo Labs Take To Quick Printing! –
Independent photo labs have always been good at having more than one string to their bow. Now some are adding quick printing to the mix of services they offer. KAZ Photo in East London (UK) trialled the EXENUX photo book printer from www.photomart.co.uk. But when PhotoWeek! sent a reporter there to see how they were getting on, we found they had put the EXENUX to work as a digital press instead! You can watch the interview we recorded on YouTube! [expand story >>>]

The manager of KAZ realised her Photoshop people also knew how to do design for print (in Quark XPress and Adobe InDesign). She started selling this service to local businesses, and to her photo customers. She claims she's seen a seventy percent increase in this side of her business since the EXENUX was installed.



She tells us that the main improvements the EXENUX has over other lasers she has bought are a lack of jamming, an ability to handle heavier stocks and larger sizes, including SRA3+ and banner lengths, and the capability to accept custom sizes and irregular shapes. [add comment]

DOLI 0810 MINILAB WINS DIMA

• DOLI 0810 MiniLab wins DIMA! – The Shanghai Doli 0810 minilab has won the 2008 PMA DIMA Digital Printer Shoot-Out competition in Las Vegas this year, in the Industrial High-Speed 4"x6" RA-4 printer category. [expand story >>>]

The DIMA win is based on image quality, as measured by quantitative factors used by colour scientists, and also by qualitative factors, such as flesh tones and neutrality, that were assessed by a panel of expert judges. The win is a testimony to the engineering and design of the Doli 0810. It sends a message to photo lab owners that when they buy the affordable Doli 0810, they're getting a machine that will produce better prints than some systems costing twice as much. [add comment]

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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