"Ned Simmons" wrote in message
...
On Wed, 31 Dec 2008 06:12:42 -0800, Larry Jaques
wrote:

On Wed, 31 Dec 2008 00:37:54 -0500, the infamous "Ed Huntress"
scrawled the following:



Color separations used to cost $750/page -- that's what it cost us for
seps
at _American Machinist_, back in the mid-'70s. Today, they're around $25
plus proofs.

When I was in the heyday of my typesetting career (15-20 years ago) I
was printing polyester plates for separations on my HP5P laser
printer. They were good for about 5k copies each on my buddy's old
single-head Multilith 1250 press. They cost us $3 apiece in 12x21"
size. Today, the fantastic electronic-headed presses print and install
their own plates from used pixels. Wunnerful! I miss going to the
Heidelberg conventions in HelL.A. every year. (Ditto the WesTec
conventions. WestPack had its moments, too.)

My father was a "dot etcher," the guy who tweaked the colors by
adjusting the size of the dots in color separations.

Now there's a lost art. A lot of the technical work I was doing in B&W was
an effort to avoid dot etching. I was working from negatives, and producing
B&W dye-transfer prints from them. Few people have ever heard of B&W dye
transfers -- it was a color process. But by controlled development of the
copy film and matrix, I could control density like Ansel Adams. g

--
Ed Huntress