----- Original Message ----- From: "Bruce Dayton"
Subject: Re: Apples and Oranges (was Re: Why and How I switched to Canon (for those who care) long)
Bill,
If I hear you correctly, you are saying that consumers wanted a much larger quantity of inferior photos rather than a smaller quantity of superior photos. And that is just what they got.
They wanted fast and cheap, and that is what they got. Sadly you don't get good very often when you get fast and cheap.
When I started, factory colour printing had really taken off, and lots of it was being done. The industry was quickly changing from manual printing to automatic high speed printing at the time I went into it.
The first printer I sat down at and ran used vacuum tubes in the photomultiplier drawer.
It wasn't high volume printing, a really good printer would shoot through around 75 or so rolls an hour. Redos ran at as much as 30% on manual machines if the lab cared about quality and had decent operators.
I spent several years as a machine operator on Gretag high speed machines. They were driven by a computer of some sort. I do remember that it had a series of 16 rocker switches on the front panel that had to be set right for the thing to boot, we loaded the program via punch tape, and it received printing instructions from the reprint stations via punch tape as well.
The operator's job was to feed the beast with 1150 foot rolls of paper, which it would chew through in about 15 minutes of operation, and spools of up to 250 rolls of customer film all spliced end to end.
We were considered a good lab, and we had paper waste in the 15% range off the high speed machines.
Quality control allowed for a minimum 3 button total correction to be sent for redo, which is pretty tight.
The problem with this sort of system is that it isn't fast. One hour service is out of the question in a lab that runs a couple of 4 hour production cycles a day. We ran a store front that allowed in by 8 am, out by 4 pm delivery cycles, with a 4 hour rush cycle (out by noon) at an additional charge.
The first minilabs were still 3 machine set-ups, but much downsized for storefront operations. The first ones were dip and dunk film processors, a separate printer and paper processor, and separate film cutting/sleeving and print cutting machines as well.
They took up significant space anyway. The processors both needed darkroom loading, as did the printers.
The advantage was that they could do small run processing, although paper waste was quite high if only one roll of paper was run, as the operator had to leave three or more feet
of paper on each end of the printed roll. A 24 exposure roll of film requires 12 feet of 4 inch paper, so a one roll print run automatically had 50% paper waste
They were OK for strip malls, but the shopping mall was where people were going, so the machines had to get smaller still to allow them to make money in the higher rent places. Stores pay by the square foot, so a small machine is important.
Integrating the printer with the paper processor allowed for smaller machines, and also allowed for much less paper waste due to loading/ unloading. The first minilab I ran used a clip system to run the paper through the transport, and wasted about 8 inches of paper on start up. The machines I run now waste about 4 inches of paper at the beginning of the roll.
Anyway, minilabs started out as an expensive convenience in shopping malls. When I went to work for my first one, we were getting 10 bucks a roll for processing. For that kind of money, quality was as good as we could make it.
We also bit into the full service lab sectors lucrative proofing business, which put lab workers out of jobs.
They entered the one hour lab workforce in droves though, and the knowledge level and overall print quality was quite good in the early days, we were all ex lab production managers running the things.
Those were good days, camera stores selling equipment hand over fist, with their attached labs raking in the coin on all the photofinishing.
We were so profitable that we started selling cameras as loss leader items. I remember the Minlota Maxxum 7000 body selling retail out of my camera store for $399.99. The dealer net on the camera was a over $400.00 and the list was something like $800.00.
So, we killed the retail camera sector which had been self supporting without a lab up until then, and then disaster struck.
They made so much money that they attracted the eye of mass merchants.
All of a sudden, the warehouse grocery stores and discount department stores came along, all with labs selling at close to cost.
They killed the ability of the shopping mall labs to pay rent, and since selling equipment was no longer profitable, the camera shops just closed.
Some of the lab people went out to work for the boxes, most went off and found other things to do.
Less experience in the workforce set in, and standards dropped. Boxes work on the theory that it's the same skill level as a cashiers position, and so don't allow for enough training hours, and the skill level erodes further.
Add in the amount of transience of people going through the industry, and skill levels get to the point where there is nothing left to erode.
But it's what the consumer wanted, or else it would never have happened.
William Robb
