Slides from digital files
Despite the seeming ubiquity of digital imaging these days, there's one annoying necessity that crops up every now and then: Slides. Juried shows often want them, you need them for Polaroid transfers, many galleries still prefer them, and so on.
The thing is, no matter how good your Epson or Canon printer is, you're not going to get slides out of it. There is of course the obvious workaround: Print pictures, shoot slides of prints. That annoys me, though: Digital, to me, is all about removing steps from the process of photography. Adding in a couple of generations of quality loss just doesn't make sense.
Fortunately there are machines that print digital files to slides, and service bureaus that run them. Unfortunately, they're (nearly) all exorbitantly expensive. Locally, I haven't been able to find any place that would do it for less than $10 or so, and up until two weeks or so ago the best I could find online was around $9.
Nota bene that's $9 per slide. $180 for a sheet of 20 slides? $360 to have two sets? I don't think so. Hell, I can get a good used film recorder for $1000. Five sheets of slides and I'd be money ahead.
This question gained urgency for me this last month, when I was working on a project for the new Circus Contraption show. They're a refreshingly low-tech production, but part of what that means is that these images are going to be projected with a slide projector. Which means I needed to deliver slides. Forty of them. Which I sure as shit wasn't going to do for $9 a slide.
Faced with the awful prospect of having to print the images, borrow a film SLR body (remember when I sold my Nikon gear? I don't own a camera that works well for shooting copy slides any more), set up lights, and go through the slow, laborious prospect of shooting copy slides... I hit Google again.
This time I hit pay dirt! I found Replicolor, a service bureau in Salt Lake City. Their price for 48 hour turnaround is (as of this writing) $3.75 per slide, which is much more reasonable. Heck, their price for four hour turnaround (which means, basically, next day service via FedEx) is $7.50 a slide -- less than the 48 hour turnaround price anywhere else. And to make it even sweeter, they offer a 20% discount for first-time customers, for a grand total of $3 each for my 40 slides. Yeah, I was all over that.
My only concern, of course, was the quality, but when the slides arrived today all worries vanished. The slides were crisp, color-accurate, and nicely mounted.
So here's how it works. Upload your files to Replicolor via your browser, e-mail, or their FTP server. Enter your order in their system. Sit back and wait.
Their main digital slides page lists the file formats they can accept, and mentions that you can also FedEx them a CD with files on it if you don't want to wait for your enormous files to upload to their server. The one piece of information missing is the pixel dimensions they can use, but an email asking for more information was answered very quickly (Thanks Scott!) with the details:
The largest size is:
4K - 4096x2732 Pixels - 33.5 Megabytes
8K - 8192x5460 Pixels - 135 Megabytes
The film recorder uses bicubic sampleing to size the file up or down. If files are larger than 30 Megs we run them at 8K.
So there you go. Skip the $9 a slide and up crowd, and go with a much more appropriately-priced choice. Replicolor is going to be my source of choice from now on.