Evercolor process

[Jim Brick <jim@brick.org>]

At 08:25 AM 7/23/97 -0800, you wrote:
>Jim,
>
>I remember seeing the Evercolor display at a photoconference and having
>real trouble seeing any difference between 35mm and 4x5 (Galen Rowell vs
>David Muench).  But the Nikon booth had same Rowell image printed R or C
>and was trash by comparison.  It made me realize that there is so much
>on film that separators and printers can't or won't bother to get onto
>paper, and the major reason to shoot larger formats was because of
>incompetence of color separators and printers.
>
>Donal Philby
>Shasta Lake, California (where it is hot enough to melt emulsions)
>

I know how hot it is in Shasta!!! It'll melt more than you emulsion!

As you know, Donal, the Evercolor process is a printing process, without
the printing press. The slide is scanned on a VERY EXPENSIVE drum scanner
(a ColorGetter 3T Pro Turbo) producing beaucoup pixels and mega mega bytes.
The huge digital file is then cleaned-up and tweaked on a VERY EXPENSIVE
workstation running Photoshop. The CLA'ed and enhanced file is then output
to an imagesetter which produces separation films at the SIZE OF THE FINAL
PRINT. For a 20x24 print, you get 20x24 separations. The separations are
then basically contact printed with the CMYK pigments to produce the final
print. This is a computer/printing process. You could enlarge a Minox slide
to 20x24 and think it came from an 8x10 original. There are NO OPTICS
INVOLVED. There is NO PHOTOGRAPHIC MEDIA INVOLVED. You are creating a
perfect set of separations via computer, then running them through a
pigment printer. All of this very expensive computer equipment, and labor
intensive process can truly make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. But you
pay through the sow's you know what! I get 20x24 custom (all the dodging &
burning, masking, etc. that I want) Ciba Poly Super Gloss (the good stuff)
prints for $80 for the first, $55 for 2-5, and $40 for 6-12. The first
Evercolor 20x24 will set you back a measley $1061. Prints 2-4 on the same
order are $266 each. I can get one 24x36 Ciba for $115. One Evercolor would
be $1975. For that kind of money, they damn well better be able to make a
Minox-slide print like it was an 8x10 transparency! This is not a Bokeh
process.

Jim