I did a lot of PR work for the largest metal fabrication shop in the S.E. United States. Part of what I did was get them ready for trade shows and such. We purchased a very expensive booth, complete with electrical and stands for backlit images. Now, this has been several years ago, and my guess is that things may have improved since then. Duratrans are film- just like you used to use in the good old days. You can project an image via an enlarger or other projection source and expose the film and process to make a big slide (basically). The company we worked with (They have, unfortunetly gone out of business) would vacuum mount the slide to a sheet of white plexiglass behind the image and clear in front- in essence making a sandwich from the three. the panels simply slid into the display and they looked wonderful.
Just like film, the highest quality original slide/negative/digital image, the higher the quality will be on the 'tran. And when I turned mine in, I simply gave them the RAW file or a drum scan and let them make all of the color and sharpness corrections on their system. This costs more, but ultimately, they have their equipment zeroed in for the best results and mine always had a color cast when I tried to cheap-out on these.
I have also printed and processed smaller ones in my darkroom (again, this has been years ago...), built a light box and displayed images in my home. The nice part was that it was done so that the images could be changed from time to time to keep them fresh.
Hope this helps and I haven't put any of you to sleep. :-)
Again, have a great weekend!
Mark Lent
