Yesterday I had the pleasure of getting a tour of Miller's Lab
in Columbia Mo. As luck would have it, they were in
full-court-press with holiday rush and everything and everybody
was churning out stuff as fast as they could. Very impressive!
First of all, it is amazing to see rows of printer systems
costing seven-digit figures (each) cranking out image after
image. They had a couple people doing nothing but reloading
machines and others doing non-stop calibration tests. To say
that it was "high production environment" is an understatement.
Just this one facility moved as much in one day that most labs
do in six months.
Having worked in a lab in years past, I found their systems,
checks and balances and quality control to be as good as
anything I could ever imagine. They really do have their stuff
together. As busy as they were, they gave each image the
one-on-one attention that spoke of the consistancy that I've
seen from every one of my printed projects. They had two people
that did nothing but spot-checking prints for color-consistancy
while everybody checked every print for overall quality. That's
right, 100% of the prints were hand-checked.
While there I asked many questions and managed to sneek a look
at a lot of the stuff coming off the printers and getting
additional finishing services done. One observation that I made
in my mind was that there are a lot of pros out there producing
schlock images. (This lab is exlusively for pros and does zero
consumer printing). There was also some really good stuff too,
but it's nice to know that I'm in good company when I botch a
job up.
I asked questions about uprezzing the files prior to upload and
almost got my head bit off! "NO!" Their RIP and printers do
the uprezzing on-demand and also apply a touch of sharpening and
noise-reduction to the image. If the image is upsized ahead of
time it is much more likely to get strange artifacting in the
prints. Also, this way they can use a single file for all print
sizes in the order. Another interesting tidbit is that the
entire order is printed on ONE machine. That machine is
selected based on the largest print in the order. Even though
everything is calibrated, this last bit helps keep everything
consistant for all prints within the order.
While I was at it, I asked about camera-specific
color-correction. They don't have predone profiles for types of
cameras, but most of the people doing color-correction (I
counted something like 18 people) had some bag of tricks all
ready to apply to the majority of images. (feel free to think
about this one for a minute).
The finishing services were excellent. I got to see how they do
the bonding to canvas as well as being put on stretcher-frames.
This was an important thing for me as I'm starting to utilize
this service. Another thing that intruigued me was the
surface-treatments--especially the "hand-painted" surface.
These literally are "hand-painted" brush strokes and the artist
doing it applies the stokes to match the image. For an
art-print, the results can be uncannily realistic. This is not
an inexpensive service, but could be that little extra that
"makes" the print. By far the busiest shipping department I've
ever seen. There were probably a dozen people doing nothing but
boxing up orders.
This being the busiest time of the year for them, they had every
employee working and every piece of equipment and workstation
fully manned. I asked if they worked any faster to keep up with
the load and his response was that the bottleneck is the
printers. You can't exceed their maximum print speed. During
slower times, they just run fewer machines and fewer people. The
human time-per-order remains the same. During the rush times,
people do get more "specialized".
The visit was very informative for me as I'm contemplating
investing in a large-format pigment printer. My decision is
going to get a bit tougher as I've seen their capabilities in a
new light and got to meet the people and see their processes. I
still don't have any clearcut answer, but at least I know I can
continue to use them without fear.
AG
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