Polielettronica LaserLab: The World’s Best Photographic Printer

All digital C-prints produced at Dickerman Prints photo lab come out of a Polielettronica LaserLab

Digital technology has revolutionized the production and use of photographs in profound ways, and in a remarkably short time. From the late 19th century until close to the end of the 20th, the basics of photographic technology had changed very little. However, in the 1990’s, digital printing began rapidly replacing traditional photographic printing.

Darkrooms were jettisoned for inkjet and digital photographic printers with decidedly mixed results and alarming (to some of us) rapidity. The main reason for our concern was that, until relatively recently, digital printers (and cameras) often were unable able to produce images that looked as good or better than those created by “traditional” means.

Dickerman Prints was a late analog holdout, continuing to create optically produced C-prints and Fiber-based B&W prints exclusively before converting to digital in 2007. The impetus for the switch was simple: the Polielettronica LaserLab, or “The Polie” for short.

A state of the art silver-halide photographic printer and processor and the perennial winner of industry Best Photographic Printer awards, the Polie uses modulated red, green and blue lasers that converge to expose light onto photographic paper in as little as 15 seconds with perfect edge to edge quality and up to 281 trillion colors.

After the lasers have quite literally painted the image with light*, the Fujicolor Crystal Archive paper goes through a series of precisely controlled chemicals to develop, bleach and stabilize the print. When the paper exits the Polie, this truly photographic print is dry, ready to hang and fade-free for at least 100 years. The quality of this process speaks for itself. But how is the quality? According to Polielettronica, “the word compromise does not exist…the maximum in terms of quality and productivity are the only possible targets.”

At Dickerman Prints, we love using our Polie for custom photographic printing. Our Print on Demand service makes this remarkable printer directly available to our customers to do their own printing. To learn more, please contact us or stop by.

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About Polielettronica
Polielettronica has been building photo printers in Italy since 1963 and has pioneered several new technologies over the years. Perhaps their most famous product of yester-year was PrinterVideo, which was the first printer to use a negative inversion system to preview a film image on a monitor before exposing the paper. Today they are most well known for their line of LaserLab photographic printers. In addition to the compact model that Dickerman Prints photo lab uses, Polielettronica also sells five other models capable of printing images up to 50×100”.

A few related links

• Polielettronica Home Page
• The LaserLab wins the 2009 DIMA Digital Printer Shootout

* photography, etymology of, from photos (ϕοτοσ), light, and graphos (γραοσ), writing, delineation, or painting. Although ‘heliography’, ‘photogeny’, and ‘daguerreotypy’, were first used as alternatives, ‘photography’ eventually gained universal precedence as the preferred name.