From: Bruce Dayton
Wow, big change! Last I had seen of dye sub was that it wasn't quite
as good as wet chemical prints and the archival life was much less.
Maybe nobody cares anymore that gets prints done at the labs.
Actually, my wife had some prints done recently from her camera to
give out to friends. The pictures had their children in them.
Several of the moms asked if they could get the digital image -
didn't really need/want the print.
I have seen this coming for awhile. My last bunch of weddings the
couple has really only wanted the digital images. This is starting
to look like the Kindle/book thing. I feel like cost will be the
driving factor. Printing, publishing, etc all cost more than looking
on a screen. I rarely print anything anymore and I rarely have
anyone ask to see a print anymore. With computers and handheld
devices and digital camera screens, the print is a dying breed.
Maybe that is more where Kodak is headed. The dye sub is probably
cheaper in small quantities.
May have been a lot of changes in demand in the last six months or so
since I got fired from my photolab job, but we were making good money
off of 4x6 C-prints. Mainly because the big Noritsu could churn them
out, and consumables cost less than for the dye-sub printers.
The big demand for the dye-sub prints from the kiosk was teen-age girls.
The biggest problem with the dye-sub printers was keeping sufficient
consumables in stock. We frequently ran out of the paper required for no
more reason than the distribution center didn't send enough to meet
demand. I never understood why.
The main demand for C-prints was from on-line. The bulk of my business
came in that way.
I got just enough film in the form of disposable cameras to justify
keeping the film processor running, although because it was running I
also picked up a bit of SLR business from people who still liked film.
And there were a couple of photographers who wanted to play with cross
processing E-6 in C-41 chemistry.
Biggest COST center was customers jamming cards in the kiosk card
readers and damaging the readers. Not only cost to replace the readers,
but it could put the kiosks off-line until I received the appropriate
repair part. At that, I was in better shape than most of the other labs
because I could replace the readers myself and didn't have to wait for a
tech to come out.
Second biggest COST was "books on demand", but that was because the
corporation didn't allow for sufficient training and my subordinate
operators wasted most of the consumable supplies the first week after
that became operational. In that case, the inability of the distribution
centers to supply consumables worked in my favor.
Once they'd wasted the critical components, I had to shut down the
"books on demand" system and explain to the customers we couldn't do
them without re-supply. That at least kept the untrained operators from
wasting more supplies.
OTOH, we would have had to shut down the "books on demand" process
anyway even if they hadn't wasted all the supplies the first week. We
were never re-supplied with the critical components while I worked there.
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