Minilab

Many retail stores use film or digital minilabs to provide on-site photo finishing services.

This means that the larger labs capable of processing 30,000-40,000 films a day are going out of business, and more retailers are installing minilabs.

With these chemical processes, films can be ready for collection in as little as 20 minutes, depending on the machine capabilities and the operator.

All necessary processing chemicals may arrive in a box (replenishment cartridge) containing enough bleach, developer and fixing agents to be mixed automatically for an estimated amount of paper, eliminating the need to manually handle and mix chemicals.

The leader is as wide as the widest possible format, and films attached to it are supported by guide rollers only.

The leader may be gripped on each side between toothed drive belts following the same path as the film through the mechanism.

The AOM driver can often fail causing problems in the image produced by the printing process.

Printers making use of this process can make prints of images that have been scanned using the printer's built-in CCD scanner, images that are in CDs, 3.25 inch floppy disks, ZIP disks or memory cards.

[4] After cutting an inkjet printer marks each sheet with up to 80 characters of information spread over 2 lines, before exposure using a scanning and modulated set of red, green and blue laser beams.

After exposure by lasers, the paper passes through tanks, one containing a developer, the next a bleach/fixing agent (which may also be separate) and the next containing filtered rinsing water followed by tanks with conditioning chemicals, before being dried with hot air, ejected and sorted.

[13] The laser beams are scanned across the paper using a rotating mirror octagon driven by a stepper motor.

Sensors are used to synchronize the rotation of the octagon with the signals sent by the AOM drivers to modulate the lasers.

As soon as the tray has all the prints it needs it moves down and then an empty one drops on top of it, and the process repeats.

[1] An example of a digital minilab silver halide printer is the Noritsu QSS series of machines.

In 1979 Noritsu released the QSS-2, which for the first time allowed for photo processing, from film development to color printing in just 45 minutes.

In 2002 Noritsu introduced the first dry minilab, using Epson's seven color inkjet piezoelectric printing head.

Subsequently, the minilab related assets were sold to the newly formed San Marco Imaging.

[16] Noritsu were for a short time manufacturing all of Fuji's minilab equipment until they discontinued production.

Photographs are input to the digital minilab using a built-in film scanner that captures images from negative and positive photographic films (including mounted slides), flatbed scanners, a kiosk that accepts CD-ROMs or memory cards from a digital camera, or a website that accepts uploads.

Digital minilabs are generally too expensive for typical home use, but many retailers purchase or lease them to offer photo printing services to their customers.

This is often better than can be achieved by typical home inkjet printers, and for smaller prints generally less expensive.

These machines are cheaper, smaller, and use inkjet printing instead of a chemical developing process.

This allows them to be installed in smaller retail stores, print shops, and resort/tourist locations that could not justify an expensive, high throughput, wet minilab.

"Dry lab" is a term that evolved in the professional and consumer segments of the photo printing industry to distinguish later, chemistry free (or "dry") photo printing systems from traditional, silver halide (or "wet") systems.

Although not strictly "dry", the first technology is a dye based, four colour (Yellow, Cyan, Magenta & Black) inkjet system.