from old notebook… circa 1986, the end of days for dye labs.
Making dyes wasn’t as expensive as you may have thought. By the 80s, it was on its last lap. The large labs knew; only the lollipops didn’t.
These pages are from a small lab, a lollipop. He was late to the game and hoping that he could save money by doing his own work. The prices are from his Kodak rep. The times are from him watching us make prints for him. He then figured whether it was worth it for us to continue making prints. He chose to do the work himself. He didn’t know that our costs were half of what he was being charged by Kodak.
timing for 1st and 2nd dye transfer prints. The cost notations are the clients estimated costs from his Kodak rep.
The catalog pages from Kodak… two of the declining years. Most commercial labs knew the end was coming. Not everyone had the same estimator, nor did they have an exit. Kodak had fewer items at much higher prices. In the end, during that last official call, most of the sales were for chemistry. The film was eventually scrapped by Kodak as unsold waste.
This was a lesson Efke wasn’t taught. They learned on their own: specialty markets require specail handling. Of the three rolls of matrix-film produced, they sold less than half of one of them. The largest buyer, other than the originating university, was a British lab that never went into production.
Kodak was pulling the plug much earlier:
in 1981, Kodak issued a notice that products were being dropped. This notice drew several calls to Kodak’s C-suite.
It also caused the larger (Monarch) labs to consider buying Kodak’s process, as a license or outright. That didn’t happen — lucky for them. Don’t know. Could the process have been maintained by user labs?
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