Artur Krzykowiak at Double Take Studios

DoubleTake Studios, the portrait, make-over and boudoir photography chain with branches in London, Manchester, Southampton (and soon Birmingham), installed their first Fujifilm Frontier DL410 Dry Minilab in March 2009, and by June had installed two more.

They use the DL410 dry minilabs to print 8 x 12 inch contact sheets for clients. This work was formerly printed on desktop inkjet printers. But the cost-per-print, wear-and-tear, breakdowns, and the need for frequent manual intervention, were all too high on these machines. What DoubleTake needed was an industrial strength solution.

Artur Krzykowiak, production and retouching manager for DoubleTake, says: “Producing the contact sheets on the desktop inkjets was very expensive if you compare the price per page. I think it’s almost ten times more to do it on an inkjet than on a dry lab. Although the inkjet printer only costs you maybe one hundred pounds to buy, and the dry lab is obviously far more, over the years it’s a massive saving. I think the price per print for an A4 page on the dry lab is about seventeen pence, and it replaces inkjets that were costing us up to one pound fifty, so it’s a massive difference.”

Each of DoubleTake’s four studios produce between 140 and 250 contact sheets a day. The studios were already a Fujifilm house, doing their production printing on Fujicolor Crystal Archive paper, on Frontier 330 and 770 minilabs. After evaluating the alternatives, DoubleTake chose to buy their new solution from Fujifilm too.

Krzykowiak tells us: “We’d been using the Frontier 330 for about six years, and it was one of the most reliable pieces of equipment ever. We had really good experience of Fujifilm and Fujifilm support. We knew their after-care was great. Because we knew their service, and we knew what we can expect from Fujifilm, we decided to go with them, even though the price might have been slightly higher than some others.”

And DoubleTake discovered another benefit of installing Frontier DL410 dry minilabs. Because its prints are production quality, on an occasion when their main Frontier 330 went down, one of the studios was able to fail-over onto the Frontier DL410 dry minilab and print portraits on that.

Krzykowiak concludes: “Dry minilabs from Fujifilm are a great alternative.”