AG thanks for sharing your tour with us.
This is exactly why I stopped horsing around with printing pix at
home. It costs less for my lab to do a better job than I could ever
do.
Duh. Easy decision, even for me.
ScottGee1
On 12/9/06, AG Schnozz <agschnozz@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 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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