I own an Alps MD-1300 printer which can do dye-sub printing and have been
printing a lot for the past few months. The quality of these dye-sub prints is
good enough for me to sell although I have said to my customers that I would
reprint free within one year if a print fades and later at a cost. As far as a
5x7 print which I priced at $8.00 each is concerned, I am hoping that this
reprinting offer will be within my cost. A custom Fuji print from a lab I use
for Ilfochrome is $12.00 for 5x7.
For those of you who are considering the digital darkroom instead of relying on
photo labs to do your printing, you need to consider the cost of onsumables
(paper and ink) plus your time vs. driving to the lab and the cost of reprints.
Depending on to what degree you want to perfect each photo, doing the digital
darkroom is making your own custom prints. It does eat up your time.
Yesterday I found out at the last moment one of the prints I had machine-printed
looked too light. Since this 31/2x5 print was one of the prints I was shipping
to an out-of-town customer (a former choir member who went to Scotland with us),
I quickly printed out a 31/2x5 print on my Alps from a JPG file I had prepared
earlier to show her which prints she would like to buy. I don't think I did any
color correction on this JPG file. There are some prints one can make quickly
without using up a lot of one's time and consumables.
If you are thinking of economizing on films and printing, the best I can suggest
is to use slide films with prepaid processing and buy a bulk (your one-year
supply) from a place like B&H.
If you are serious about the digital darkroom, I recommend the Alps MD-1300
printer highly even though it certainly makes a lot of noise when in operation.
I previously used an Epson Stylus Pro inkjet printer. The Alps printer is
light hence it is easy to move around. I am currently using this printer with
my CTX laptop, both of which can be put away easily. Speaking of the computer,
in order to do the digital darkroom work, one needs a huge hard drive. Since my
laptop only has a 2GB drive, I am transferring some of my files to my MO disks,
but they quickly fill up so I am eagerly waiting for the arrival of 10 free
230MB MO disks (as a rebate with my Olympus MO drive).
Tomoko Yamamoto
mailto:tomokoy@xxxxxxxxx
http://www.charm.net/~tomokoy/
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