How many of you use a commercial lab for printing your digital prints? As opposed to processing and printing them yourself. If you do it commercially, who are some good ones. I've been doing them myself, but am growing weary of the computer time involved.

I use this company, they are in the UK so no use for you. But the result you get from this sort of print company is in another league from anything you can do at home.
http://digitalprintdesign.co.uk/

Even if you went nuts, sold the house and bought the same print gear you still wouldn't get the sane thing in the end.
It's not even very expensive, considering you are not wasting loads of ink and photo paper trying to get a decent print.

Send your stuff to this place. http://www.northcoastphoto.com/

Just FTP the files and they send them to you, easy peasy.


This is one of my complaints abotu digital stuff, we went from optical film prints done by hand to ink jets that look like crap. NCPS does great work and they also process and scan my B & W.

Thaks for the link, NorthCoast looks like the place I will work with. I just bought a Nikon D90 and have been looking for a good printing service.

quote:

Originally posted by BaxterB:
Send your stuff to this place. http://www.northcoastphoto.com/

Just FTP the files and they send them to you, easy peasy.


This is one of my complaints abotu digital stuff, we went from optical film prints done by hand to ink jets that look like crap. NCPS does great work and they also process and scan my B & W.

Good Luck. The D90 is a great camera; it;s all up to you now! :-)

Yea I am an old film Nikon man, have several F2's and F3's plus a ton of lenses.

Finally took the digital SLR plunge after the last KodaChrome lab shut down. "Mama don't take my KodaChrome away"

Was having fun today with the D90 and my 500mm Nikkor Reflex. With the 1.5 factor I am shooting what used to be 750mm. Have to lock the mirror up when exposing, other wise get a little blur. Only problem with the D90 is too many features!!!! I will try the heavy tripod tomorrow, it is a old Samson fluid head that weighs about 30 pounds. The Slick Master Tripod I was using today is not stiff enough. I have a 800mm straight lens that I will also try.

Burst and bracketing on the D90 is a real plus.

Alternatives include inkjet and high res color laser technology.

I quickley tired of inkjet because of the cost per print. Good quality with photo paper in some cases.

Hewlett Packard and Zerox (Formerly Tektronix) makes quality color laser printers that do prints for proofing or low quality prints at 600 dpi plus. Once you get by the initial capital cost, cost per print is really low.

You can find used production units on the internet for reasonable cost.

If you need analog glossys then the service companies are the answer, particularly if you need quantity multiples.

For me though the color lasers do 95% of my work.

I use Fineprint, in Boulder Colorado. They cater to professionals and their greatest assest is the ability to perfectly match future orders to prints they produced in the past. You have to oder in fairly large quanitites to keep the costs down but if you are selling them this should not be an issue.