New York Photography Blog

After being stuck with a non-functioning printer, not to mention the amount of time I’m spending prints and shipping, I came to conclusion that it was time to outsource my printing to WCI (West Coast Imaging).  Take my word for it – they are the best around.

They’ll do the prints on the same paper that I use, and I’ll let them deal with the printing, and when prints don’t need to be signed, they can drop ship directly to the customer.

As a result, new prices and sizes are in effect.  What effect this will have on orders I don’t know, but my guess is that they will drop off substantially.  On the other hand, my workload will also decrease substantially.  Or, it may work the other way and attract an audience with deeper pockets.

The new prices range from $100 to $400.  Still not crazy expensive for the sizes being offered, but the inexpensive stuff is gone.

If it works out, I’ll be able to spend more time with the creative side of the business.  And for those of you who bought prints in the past, your investment has just gone up.

STATUS:

I’m making it back to a state of equilibrium.  The 4800 is working (though about to run out of ink in two cartridges), but I was able to catch up with the smaller prints that need to go out tomorrow.

And I just uploaded a few files to WCI, and ordered three of each (i.e. the more you order, the less it costs, although I think you don’t hit a big discount until you order 10 prints of the same image.)

For now, I’m having the prints sent back to me because I am promising to sign prints on the site; but maybe there’s some way around that as it would be much more efficient to drop ship to customer.  That’s what I’ve done with the very large prints I’ve done at WCI.

Now, if I went with their Express Lab, I could have very fast turnaround and much cheaper prices, but of course you can’t do fine art inkjets like you can do those chromogenic (is that the right word?) prints.

Price List and papers in Express Lab at WCI

Now, if I could live with b&w prints from the Express Lab – then I could a) have great turnaround time and b) more consumer friendly prices.

That’s really the bottom line – art costs more money because more time and skill are involved.  I’m going to download the ROES software (I might have it already) and order prints on each of the offered papers in the Express Lab.  I know I’ve done this before, but it may not have been with WCI.  I’m going to take the tough one, Night Storm that depends on good blacks, and print it on each paper.