Curious if anyone here might know this: In the old days, the press services used this quickie print machine to process paper. I owned one, years ago, but forgot the name. It might have been called EktaMatic Kodak. It was a desktop machine, about the size of an 8.5x11 Epson now, and it used two chemicals only -- an Activator and something else -- and you just poured them into the machine. The print processed in like seventy seconds or so, dry to dry.
Could a mentality like this be applied to digital printing? I know everyone loves Epson and all, but if you've ever stood side by side, with a silver print and an inkjet print, there is no comparison, the silver print wins pretty much every time. I do not know why. Maybe some elusive word like "luminosity" or something. I don't know why; I just know it does.
Could there be a machine, that would contain silver chemistry, but on the back of it, was some kind of USB or Firewire port, and you'd just hit PRINT, and then feed silver paper into this machine, and the machine would convert it from digital to whatever, and then image it onto the silver paper and process it? I guess it exists already, and it's called a Lambda, but the one I saw was the size of a bedroom, and cost hundreds of thousands. Could there be a "desktop Lambda"...?
To me, in most every aspect of this conversion from Film to Digital, the Digital is winning, except for this one area: Printing. Inkjet just does not have that "inner glow", whatever that means. I guess if it could have been done, Kodak would have done it already, and they'd be sitting pretty in Rochester, giving Epson and HP a run for their money.