On Wed, 31 Dec 2008 11:53:45 -0500, the infamous "Ed Huntress"
scrawled the following:


"Larry Jaques" wrote in message
.. .
On Wed, 31 Dec 2008 00:37:54 -0500, the infamous "Ed Huntress"
scrawled the following:


"Larry Jaques" wrote in message
...
On Tue, 30 Dec 2008 13:44:59 -0500, the infamous "Ed Huntress"
scrawled the following:

Our solution was to throw theirs out and to produce our own.

That was a good idea.

Yeah, but the big one I wrote for them was 24 pages, and cost roughly
$1,000/page after printing. And that was 26 years ago.

Yeah, it used to be a real expensive task.


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.

Uh, OK. There are separations and there are separations. I made a lot of
them for a local newspaper back in the early '70s, using my 4x5 view camera
and Kodak Tri-Pak separation film. They were worth what I charged --
$10/each. g

True, we were _not_ making 300 line seps on a 600dpi printer, but the
technology was fine for inexpensive biz cards, brochures, hang tags,
postcards, etc.


At the other end, we had a client for whom we produced coffee-table-quality
fashion work, and I had dye-transfer prints made for each separation. They
cost us close to $1,500/page by the time they were done, even when we ganged
the photos for the dye prints. That was before we had press proofs made,
and, of course, without the printing cost. Sheesh.

Triple ouch!


Since you have done some process work you'll appreciate the two technical
jobs I used to do before I started freelancing photography for McGraw-Hill
(before they hired me as a writer -- there's a logical leap, eh?). I was
making B&W dye transfers, and silver-masked Kodachromes. The latter was the
pre-digital equivalent of Photoshop's "unsharp masking," done with film.
Both are very specialized jobs that went only to the highest-quality fashion
and food agencies. Hmmm....I think we discussed this once before, eh?

------
We're born hungry, wet, 'n naked, and it gets worse from there.