----- Original Message ----- From: "David Dyer-Bennet" : Do you have any idea how many prints 30 220ml ink cartridges will make : in a 7600? It's a *really* huge number. oh yes I certainly do! we went thru many thousands of dollars of ink *per month* at college with just a single one of the 2 working.. it was a heck of a lot more than our total cost for a whole year in RA4 chemistry! :-) but then, we also knew we were throwing out over $100 worth of ink with each chipped cart that insisted it was empty :-( Some of the lecturers had convinced the manager that inkjets would be cheaper so the RA4 lab was to be run in a 'phase out' stage untill the last students who used the things previously could be weaned off it. They'd speculated that the costs savings would allow them to buy a whole raft of cameras with the savings. In the first 3 months the entire (former chemical) budget had been blown on inks :-( ..Then the lecturers who'd been pro digi realised students were utterly useless at colour correcting compared to those who'd been trained in the colour darkroom. So now they run both and students get to pick which way they want to go .. only AFTER they've learned to colour correct on the RA4 ;-) .. the enlargers have all been refurbished and there was even talk of expanding the RA4 area. A studio I worked with as a consultant set up a 7600 - the guy running it was formerly a partner in the biggest pro outfit in our state which ran their own labs including 8x10 Ee6, C41 and ra4's up to their biggest - a 60" processor. The inkjet printer he so desperately wanted sits in a corner unused now and he outsources the RA4. He's confessed he wished he'd kept at least one processor and he's even offered to give the printer to a few people but no one would take it. :Which keeps you going for a year or less, then you need to spend :*another* few thousand on chemicals, film, and paper. And you use a :lot more paper, since that's the only way to see your work. hehe, I learned to see negs as positives. Pretty simple really, and an 8x10 contact print is about 50c in paper (our worthless currency) : What I know about *my own* color printing skills is that I can do : immensely better with digital and an inkjet than I ever could in a : lab. And I don't have the patience to learn dye transfer (besides, : the materials are discontinued). I don't use labs for RA4 unless it's for cheap proofs, but I know MY skills in a darkroom allow me to knock out some pretty swish 20" wide prints with ease Bleach fix can be regenerated, CD-r is cheap, and the paper cost being slightly less than Inkjet offsets the film costs, so I can pretty much call that a break even situation. You DO know that the biggest increase in photo sales worldwide has been in RA4 paper.. all the mums and dads are using it for frontier prints having tossed their inkjets after the initial inks ran dry ;-) paper's cheap! :-) k
