Kodak 8660/8670PS timings

[Richard_Goulden]

HI All,


I spent Saturday night shooting a Ladies Night and because the orders that came in were all all placed within the space of ten minutes we were snowed under and struggled to fulfill the orders.

I was printing with an Olympus P400 and although the quality is excellent it is just not quick enough for the turnaround that I would like to offer.

Are any of you printing on the Kodak Dye Subs (the 8660 or 8670PS) and what are the timings for 10x8 prints? Kodak timings give a print time of 70 seconds.

I did have a demo of both Kodaks at Calumet a few months ago and the knowledge of the sale guy was appalling and the printer had the minimum ram cofiguration and no ethernet card, which, apparently, speeds things up a lot.
Any help with timings etc would be very helpful.

Regards,

Richard

[Gregg_Emslie]

Richard; There are two pieces to achieve the speed you require. Kodak software called PCPRO (soon to be Image Ware) runs on a dual processor PC box. The image assembly is done on the front processor and the print queue is run on the back processor. What that gives you is assembly of images as fast as you can go, and a print queue that can manage up to six 8660 dye sub printers at a time.
The prints per hour on a 8660 is about 35 8x10(SCSI connected). The print queue will hand out the print jobs to the next available printer (you can walk away at this point). The more printers you have, the faster the output.
The greatest news is the annoucement of the ML-500 from Kodak. This machine will produce 270 dye subs per hour. Thats about 13 seconds each (on a 1394 firewire connection).
The trick to production is more than just printer, it is the whole work flow. Also if you are shooting on Kodak DCS760 or 720X cameras, PC PRO will work directly from the raw images no .tif required. Saves time.
We handled 84 hockey teams at a tournament in four days with 1-PC with PC PRO, 2-DCS720xs and 2-8660s.
Gregg