Digital BW, The Print

Leroy writes:

> Nice Work Anthony, I have been using Portra
> B&W for some time now."35mm"

Thanks.  Portra works great for 35mm, too (I'm rescanning an example now).
The grain is so fine and the resolution so high that you can get beautiful
results from either format, it seems.

> My closest Minilab, Walgreen's has just installed
> a Fuji Frontier 330 system. I really like the results
> from this combo.

The advent of the Frontiers has changed a lot for me.  I can now take my
carefully optimized scans to my local one-hour lab (just up the street--a
new branch has opened), and get prints that look exactly like the images on
my monitor at a reasonable price (8x12 for $4--I like 8x12).  Since the
Frontiers came to town, I almost never print any color images on my own
ink-jet printer; the Frontier does a better job, and it's cheaper.

I've not used the Frontier much for black and white, so the jury is still
out on that; I suspect that a nice ink-jet set up dedicated to B&W (if I had
one!) might do a better job.  I do note, however, that Frontiers can print
from digital files without any color casts, since they are calibrated to
reproduce RGB grayscale as grayscale on color paper.  This is a big change
from the old analog stuff that would produce a different color cast every
time.