Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2003/01/12
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]Don Dory writes: > Alastair, the reason companies are moving digital printing to photographic > paper is twofold. > First, the money to be made by Kodak, Fuji, et al is in selling paper and > chemistry. Also, process, control, and longevity are well known variables. > The only hard part was designing the three color lasers needed to expose the > paper. > > The second reason is that very few companies are willing to spend the R&D to > create a whole new system to accomplish the same thing, printing images. On > the smaller scale only Epson was willing to drive the ink jet market from a > poor persons business printer to the industry standard for independent > photographers. This took what, five or so years from the first Photo Stylus > printer? > > Ever since the SciTech machines almost everyone has known that manipulating > visual information in the digital realm provided far more control. Also, > once manipulated, you can generate infinite exact copies easily. Of course, > imagine "Moonrise over Hernandez" printed a billion times and that thought > is not entirely pleasant. Don, you are probably correct, though why these companies would want to back a looser, and spend money to produce digital "enlargers" is beyond me. Like a lot of things, I guess we will all have to wait and see if the beta or VHS format wins out: best system does not always equal success. Cheers Alastair Firkin @ work ;-) http://www.afirkin.com http://www.familyofman2.com - -- To unsubscribe, see http://mejac.palo-alto.ca.us/leica-users/unsub.html