It gets worse -- your perfectly frozen and archived family memories need to compete with the Christmas turkey for space. I'm sorry, but burning to DVD is easier than fighting over freezer space with my wife.

I never had such problem, used but modern freezers and refrigerators are easy and cheap to obtain at least here in northern eu. one freezer with safelight in the darkroom (cost less than 200€), another one for the foods. I store my films in two forms, the originals and scanned versions on dvd. for my digital images I use double backup on dvds. i don't see any problems, what could be easier?

It must be nice to have unlimited funds for freezers and electricity bills and the space to accomodate them all. I have three full-size freezers and they are all full of frozen food stuffs with one tiny corner given over to several hundred rolls of MF film that I buy in bulk. You wouldn't believe how hard I had to fight to displace a half dozen frozen hams that were encroaching on that space.

I'm afraid that even if I could afford more freezers or the power for them, my wife would commandeer them anyhow. Part of living in the country where you're at least an hour and a half away from decent shopping.

My negs will have to continue to live in the old metal filing cabinets that I've been picking up at government auctions for $5 apiece, and on DVD.

So...uh....if I don't understand the lion's share of what is being discussed am I a poor photographer or what?

(1/2 serious question)

Oh, screw it, whered I put the rebel....

I'm not a moderator, but I believe this discussion thread has outlived its usefulness, which was anyhow heavily compromised from the start by the absence of the real supporting evidence - yet to be pubished in the DVD disc that Michael et Co are producing.

Actually, I was about to start another digression about the relative merits of Kelvinator vs. Frigidair products.

Michael

This would be a completely flawed comparison without including Whirlpool or Kenmore

Paul

Actually, we have an LG. In this day and age if you don't include comparisons with the new entrants from the Far East you are just behind the 8-ball.

And what about the European contingent?

Given how the market is moving with Ilford hanging on by its teeth, kodak out of B&W, agfa dead, kodak closing its factories by the month and desperately trying to consolidate huge losses for the 6th year running..... As a matter of interest, what chemical B&W paper are you going to print onto in 30 years time and with what chemicals?

Interesting!

Well as a b&w photographer, you would be amazed at how many of us still use film. I use digital too, but it cannot match film...yet...

Its simple economics...if there is demand, there will be supply...

And there is demand....I often wonder why people desire the death of film, nobody makes you use it you know! Kodak stopped b&w paper..not film

You'd be surprised, but the economics is not that simple. There is something called overhead and scale economies. Below a certain break-even volume of production manufacfturers either lose money or they find more money is to be made shifting their resources into something else. Money and alternative earning opportunities are fungible. That's why the factories are closing even though a shrunken volume of demand remains. As the demand keeps shrinking so will the factories. It will reach a point when film and darkroom materials become quite costly niche products serving a very small fraction of the total photography market. I don't know the time path to near-extinction, but it's obviously quite steep.

Barry, it's not a matter of wanting or not wanting something to happen, when Ilford died I was still shooting med format Ilford in various speeds. I do not think at this point in time that inkjet printing is of any use except to fine art photographers with a lot of time and patience. Inkjet is certainly not a solution for a busy wedding/event photographer like myself printing hundreds of 7X5" proofs a week sometimes thousands. For the little landscape work I do inkjet is certainly not an affordable or viable solution. I read with dismay recently that Kodak are hiking up their colour chemical paper prices and given that almost all labs here in the UK are Fuji and Agfa is dead I am rather worried for a future where the economics will pull chemical printings carpet from under out feet before inkjet has matured to the point of easy accessability or affordability. Just looking at any digital printing forum is enough to scare me away from it!

Ben, well you are confirming what I said just above about the behaviour of the economics. As for the comparative efficiency of inkjet printing, I believe that a large percentage of wedding and event photographers are fully converted to a highly efficient digital+inkjet workflow that saves them huge amounts of time and money for numerous reasons. Just on a personal note, I attended a Bat Mitzvah in the US last week and had a chat with the photographer they hired for the event. She uses a Canon 5D with a flash, and a slave unit, her workflow from capture through printing is standardized; she processes all the images through Adobe Bridge, Photoshop and a printer RIP using automated procedures. She told me there is no other way she could work given the high volume she does and the quality that is expected.

We're all gonna die !

the chemicals aren't really going anywhere... i regularly coat platinum, which hasn't been a major commercial product since the beginning of the last century. Hand coating silver is pretty easy, and the raw chemicals to do so are readily availaable.

coating film, though, is a bit more difficult

jim

Exactly.

Mark, economically and time wise it still doesn't make sense for me - for proof printing. There are no printers that can print and cut hundreds of 7X5" prints without any worry about ink etc, for the price I get from my lab where I drop off the CD and pick up the prints the next day. If there is then I'm very interested to hear about it. Dye Sub is expensive and unarchieval. To put it into perspective I'm paying 10.9 pence per 7X5" cropped cut print on Fuji Crystal Archeive with perfect screen to print colour. If you can beat that and I include set up costs (printer/rip/time) then I'll switch if shown to me that an inkjet printer is an investment and not something that will be hard to find ther consumables for 3 years from now, or if it goes down, necessitate expensive and time consuming repairs. I'm a pro and I need backup but certainly cannot afford backup of a quality printer, or at least I don't think I can!

I climbed mount sanai,(1999) & I ask God when I'm going to die. He tell me ask him again in three thousand three hundred thirty three years with therty three days.
So I don't know if I'm going to die at all. Amen to me

BlasR

Sorry, I didn't mean to boast. I have quite many restrictions too, here in downtown helsinki majority of people live in appartment house flats which aren't really that great in size (except for the ones that cost incredibly much). I currently live in a 59m^2 flat with my wife and I've really had to struggle making enough space even for my needed working space for architecture stuff. I share my light table between the negs and drawings and my displays, computers etc are shoved inside a bookshelf to save space I can't afford nor have space for my own dark room - luckily I have access to a large darkroom, 2 studios and a couple of sinars at the helsinki dept. of architecture thanks to my studies, otherwise my photographing would be severly limited compared to what it is now..

Imho it's fair to say that actually the photopapers and films in our refrigerator take less space than the digital backups and storage for my photos, because I scan backups of my films too. So I'm struggling with storing heaps and piles of dvd's

Ben, we all need to do what makes the most sense in our circumstances. I was only drawing attention to one example of many working profesionals who operate a totally integrated digital workflow, but what works for some will not necessarily be optimal for others. If you and your lab are well colour-managed between yourselves and the lab produces what your clients are willing to pay for, you have accomplished something that isn't usually easy to achieve, so it sounds as if you should cherish it. Also the cost seems eminently reasonable. I can't produce a 5*7 out of my Epson 4800 for 11 pence - (assume we are talking UK, which in CAD would be about 22 cents).

That much said, I believe according to Henry Wilhelm's testing, Fuji Crystal Archive properly handled will not begin to deteriorate for about 65 years, which is conisderably shorter than said to be achievable with Epson K3 inks and media. This could be a problem for BlasR because the guy on top of Mt. Sinai told him he has 3333 years and 33 days to live - so he really needs thosse inkjet prints and a very long memory - but for the rest of us mere mortals 65 years would outlive the longevity of the average marriage by many years, and who knows whether the grand-children would really be interested in all those wedding photos anyhow! I keep getting asked what I'm going to do with all these photographs from my 4800 I'm "archiving", and all I can respond is "enjoy them" and hope that some time in the future my descendants will enjoy them too. What to say.

Hey I'm open minded (ish), if there is an inkjet solution that is more economical then I will use it, my decision to go digital has been an economical one from day one though the other perks are nice.

As for the archival properties of the paper, heck it's as good as anyone has been getting until now save B&W silver prints, customers cannot complain that I'm not giving them at least the industry standard.

Ben, if your customers are happy and that is the objective, fine. It's when you need more on-the-spot custom control over the printing, more longevity, and more flexibility with media and subject matter that the inket solution becomes rather inescapable.

Geez! Ben, and I thought the U.K is an expensive place compared with Australia. I pay around A$290 for a 30M roll of 600mm wide Epson Premium Lustre.

If my maths is right, 5x7 is 125x175mm = 0.021875 M^. 30M x0.6M = 18M^. Allowing for a small amount of wastage, I would expect to get about 800x5"x7" prints from the roll. $290/800 = 36 cents = 14.5p per print. I don't know exactly what the ink costs would be, but the impression I get is they are about equal to the cost of premium paper, so I reckon just the cost of consumables would be around 29p per print for me, using the Epson 7600. Factor in depreciation on the printer, general overheads and my time, and the final cost would be at least double.

11p per print?? You're kidding!

Gosh and how did we manage before Inkjets matured to that point (a year ago?)

I print on Fuji Crystal Achive, Fuji (wedding) pro paper, Kodak Pro Endura, Ilford Hi Gloss, Kodak Mettallic and canvas from an Epson depending on what lab I use for which purpose. I can email the pictures to all 5 labs and because they are all pro labs with well calibrated machines, the colour differences are so slight as to be easily ignored.
I did a test actually recently between my Fuji CA and Kodak Endura, one from a lab in the US one from a lab here, same 3 files. Little to no colour difference at all, infact far less difference than printing the same neg on those papers would give as the calibration of the machine/paper cancels out 98% of the papers colour attributes to neutral.
One thing I will say is that the Kodak makes far more neutral B&W's than the Fuji which have a green tinge (this is from 3 seperate labs, it's a machine/paper problem not operator I think) but I've never seen a B&W printed on colour chemical paper to come anywhere near a silver print.

For me, and feel free to put me straight on this, this is only coming from my own preconceptions:
Inkjet printing is expensive relative to chemical printing from a regular lab;
Calibrating the printer is both expensive and time consuming involving RIP's, colour checkers, seperate profiles for each paper, etc;
Trimming the prints to size is time consuming and wasteful economically even when using a program to utilize the maximum amount of space;
Ink is expensive and extremely expensive when having to run wasteful cleaning cycles on a regular basis;
An inkjet printer has a limited life, I should not count on it as a 5 year plus investment;
Even were it to last that long the ink might be unavailible or difficult to find and expensive;
The industry is yet to mature to the point where it can overtake chemical printing in every way. What I mean is that B&W is still not there yet (has metamirism vanished as a problem yet? why are new papers still being released to solve problems etc?). Just recently it was pointed out that the Epson Matt papers are not there yet with the Matte ink.

Don't kill me for these points, they are what I think through what I've picked up over the web but I have no direct experience at all with inkjet printing of a professional standard. What it seems to me is that as yet it is not mature, just as digital photography has not yet matured. It also seems to be extremely expensive by the time you get it all right. I think I'll wait it out until it does mature and then if it is wise economically then I'll happily go for it.

Ben, a fair amount of what you are saying above is incorrect from my experience.

Whether or not inkjet printing is expensive compared with a lab depends on what size you are printing, how much customization you need, which inkjet printing system you are using and what kind of paper you need. One cannot generalize about this. Maybe you have one specific set of needs that come cheaper from your labs, but that is not the universe of situations.

Calibrating the printer takes about 2 minutes to print a target, and if you do your own profiling about 10 minutes to create the profile. If you send the target to a professional profiling service, the time it takes to mail the target, and about 50 dollars more or less. If you have a friend with a profiling kit, the friend can make it for you free - if a good friend! If you plan to use alot of different papers it may pay to buy a profiling system for about 1000 dollars, otherwise, you get a few profiles made and use them repeatedly. If you buy a RIP say from Colorbyte the profiles are included and any other profile you need is made free on request. ImagePrint RIP does all your layouts and is programmed to minimize wastage of paper relative to the layout parameters you give it. Many professionals swear by it for this purpose.

You can read my articles on this website about the cost of using an Epson 4800. But Epson is not the only show in town any longer and I understand other makes are less prone to clogging. The Epson 4800 is a substantial improvement over the Epson 4000 in this respect.

Inkjet printers - especially Epson's professional machines are built like tanks and physically they will far outlive their economic life, which is determined by technological obsolescence, not by wearing-out. You can keep it as long as you are happy not up-grading to newer technologies. That is a matter of personal choice.

Inkjet inks for whatever prevalent model you buy will most likely be available for years after most of these machines have been re-cycled out of use. We can't make iron-clad forward-looking statements about long-term availability of ink cartridges, but I've seen ZERO complaints anywhere on the internet about people not being able to get the supplies they need for their printers.

The general professional consensus is that this technology is mature and the highest quality black and white printing is now possible from the latest model inkjet printers being produced certainly by Epson and most likely by the new Canon offerings. You will find material on this website and in the L-L Video Journal attesting to this. There will always be people who refuse to believe this, but that is their problem, not an objective reality.

I have been doing inkjet printing for the past six years, starting with the Epson 2000P, graduating to the 4000 and since last November a 4800. I am doing work I never thought possible in both colour and B&W and there is no way I would even dream of getting into a wet-lab environment again, whether for colour or B&W - it is for most intents and purposes so surpassed that it's not worth talking about.

Considering what you get and the flexibility and possibilities it offers, and by the time you amortize the initial investments over a reasonable volume of output, this is a bargain and it will most likely keep becoming cheaper in real terms.

We live to learn!

Well I am not printing in anywhere near the volume some people here are. And I wont go in depth into the overpriced inkjet cartridges debate...thats a clear one..

I have never found 35mm film (b&w) to be so cheap...processing I wont do myself...I have little interest in that area anymore. But I will carry on using film for as long as possible..though I shoot more digital.

I think the cost of processing film is cheaper than volume printing from an inkjet..and for most consumers, its really been false economy in a sense going digital for them. I dont blame the technology...but rather the manufacturers..

Ink costs more per ml than the finest champagne, and russian imported caviar. I find that somewhat shocking.

It's also way more expensive than gasoline for your car, but the comparison is devoid of any signifigance unless you happen to know a great deal about the technology and manufacturing costs that go into the formulation and production of these inks compared with champagne, Russian caviar or gasoline.

"Ink costs more per ml than the finest champagne. I find that somewhat shocking."

Indeed, but that's not the worse part. Have you tried drinding it? Tastes like ****!

Note that K3 ink costs slightly less per ml than Channel #5. And, compared to Scorpion venom, K3 is a real bargain!

Alain, do you think a blend of trace amounts of scorpion venom with K3 would help reduce nozzle clogs? (The alcohol content of the Chanel could be harmful.)

It might but it can be risky. Being from France I'd prefer trying Channel #5 personally ;- ) At any rate it would exceed the cost of K3 ink alone. And I am not kidding. I did a search for "expensive liquids" and apparently Scorpion venom tops the list and Channel #5 is more expensive per ml than K3 inks.

At any rate knowing that Dom Perignon is cheaper than K3 inks makes it easier to legitimize high end champagne consumption. If someone says I indulge myself, I simply mention that it is cheaper than the ink I use to make my prints. See, expensive inks can be a benefit at times.

Cheers!

Such comparisons can get quite bizarre. In many coutries a litre of milk can cost less than a litre of petrol,

In any case, it's well known that profits on ink and paper support the Epson research effort towards providing us with better printers, as well as providing dividends to shareholders and multi-million dollar bonuses to executives.

Now we're completely off topic, I might as well speculate that it must be a terrible burden to be in control of such wealth that can do harm or good depending on how it's invested.

Hmmm I always thought a consumer rip off was something to be concerned about..seems I was wrong!

Honestly guys....the printer manufacturers have a lot to answer for..some are worse than others...

This isnt something to be taken lightly...its ink not some rare substance.

Barry, you tell me factually what they have to answer for? Where's your inside source of reliable data on how much operating income they make, how much of the operating income gets ploughed back into R&D and manufacturing expansion, what is their annual rate of return on net revalued assets in operation, what is the track record on their cost of capital and rates of return to shareholder equity? Once you have a good grip on all of that, you can start talking about whether the pricing is "right" or "wrong" - and Alain - I think you have it exactly right - all things in perspective - but you know it's a slippery slope when you extend the logic, because if I can buy A because it is cheaper than B, but than I can buy B because it is cheaper than C, and I can buy C because it is cheaper than D..........well you see what I mean. And then extend this game over two people in a household with competing interests for the same cash-flow and see where it takes you...............................

Oh - and Alain, I forgot to mention - once we're talking about venom - in the old days on this continent we had the proverbial snake-oil salesmen - seems that alot of folks think they are alive and well in the printer industry. On that I reserve my judgement in light of the foregoing.

I expect that Dom Perignon results in fewer clogged nozzles, but I don't expect it can achieve the same density of blacks that you can get with K3 inks, or even the lowly K2 inks.

Alain, are you sure your recent printing problems didn't have something to do with excessive D P in the system? (Sorry! I couldn't resist. I am glad the printer woes are solved.)

Eric

I can think of at least 10 people off the top of my head (who are not into printing photos) that get new ink cartridges by buying new printers. The old printer goes into the trash. As this is actually cheaper than buying new ink cartridges one has to wonder about the pricing structure.

This can happen, depending on the model of printer they are trashing and replacing, and what kind of ink. For Pro printers this will not be the case. It really isn't clear how much of the pricing strategy is related to product-specific costs or cross-subsidies designed to make the bottom-line work one way or another. You may recall that in the early days of roll film photography Kodak actually gave away the cameras to create a market for the film.

DP solves certain problems but brings up others. There's no perfect solution ;-)

right: it's a Bosch freezer loaded with Ilford and Agfa for all my Zeiss lenses!

I think the hope would be that if we get sozzled enough from drinking the DP, paying the VISA bill for the ink charges will sail through painlessly. So in fact one is an antidote for the other, but it just happens to work in the brain of the user rather than the printhead of the printer.

Mark,

Maybe you would be willing to do another of your cost analyses for us: How much must I spend on DP in order to feel that my prints really are worth every penny I spend on ink and paper as well as initial printer cost? How much more DP will it take for me to feel justified in junking my lowly 2200 and getting a 7800? I think those are the key economic questions we should be dealing with.

Eric

Eric, indeed, if possible it could make a significant contribution to the literature; but I fear there are critical data gaps to deal with. You see, it is a dynamic, non-linear problem, because there are discontinuities in cause and effect that are distributed in real time and probably asymetric (e.g. how much antidote for the front end-investment versus how much antidote for the supplies thereafter, at what cyclicality and volumes over what time period, and what discount rate for deriving present values). Unfortunately, we don't have a data base of tested cases from which to draw inferences for other consumers (i.e. Alain already has his x800 printer and consumed the DP, but probably didn't record the existential relationship between the two at the time.) Then to complicate the matter further, borrowing from the field of environmental science, you would probably need a "cumulative impacts analysis" to get it right, because the effect of alcohol on the brain works that way. My goodness, nothing like lawyers, tax accountants and economists to complicate life for us, isn't it? Better to be a humble drunken photographer, charge enough money for the prints to pay for the bl..dy ink and be done with it!

Cheers!

If you can afford DP on a regular basis then you shouldn't be worried about ink or printer costs ;-) If you are drinking Prefontaines (unexpensive French wine capped with a beer cap instead of a cork), then you are entitled to being concerned about the cost of ink & printer ;- )

It's actually ironic that this thread has decended to the level that in reality it started out.....

I'm sorry Ben, if I dare say so myself, the quality of the humour is much better at this end - it's pure, unpretentious fun!

Getting things into perspective, Channel #5 has a transitory effect, which is no doubt very pleasant for the olfactory system, but soon wears off and needs repeated application.

K3 inks, on the other hand, last a life time with one application. They are thus much better value. There should be no grounds for complaint .

Channel #5 can get you places that no amount of K3 ink ever will...

Alain,
I hope you are not implying that the opposite sex is not enamoured of my beautiful, handcrafted prints.

Not in the least. Just keep a nostril out for those customers wearing Channel #5 because their perfume being more expensive more than your ink they should be able to afford your prints. ;-)

Notice that this is not part of my regular photography marketing course ;- )