Correct. I have a fair amount of work(virtually none of it lending related) so I have no complaints in that respect. Anyone advertising $175 URAR appraisals with 24 hour turnaround deserves ZERO respect. They will not be able to continue forever at that price point and I'm sure they are doing a fairly sh!tty job. As for complaining about them, we all have that right. They are stabbing each and everyone of us in the back. They are downgrading the profession and selling it short. No wonder we get little respect as a profession. My guess is those that are defending scumbags like this have been in the business for a few years (like this cat) and think they know all they need to know.Condoning this idiot's behaviour is ludicrous.
Way back when, I worked my way through school working in photolabs and doing freelance photography work. I helped set up and run the first one hour photolab in the country. Then helped set up a chain of them. (appraiser's were our best customers, that is how I got interested in appraisal). You know what the big slow labs said when we set them up? Quality would suffer, there is no way you can produce photographs in an hour with any quality. Poor slobs. They did not understand photo processing or automation. See, there are ceratin variables in processing, but it comes down to the chemicals used have a temp range. A cool side and a warm side. If you use the cool side, the process is slower, the warm side a little faster. We are talking the difference of 15.5 minutes vs 17 minutes for developing the negatives here.
So, here is how the process used to work. The film is received, canisters taken into a dark room, loaded into a bigger canister that held several rolls, the fed through a developer machine. Once out, they are taken to a printer room. The machine holds 1000' foot rolls of paper. Someone sits there, and checks each frame and prints it until the roll of paper is used up. Then the lights go out, you transfer that roll of paper into a big dark box and take it out to a developer machine. It is fed through and rerolled at the other end. That roll is then taken to a cutter for making the individual pictures. Total processing time is about 40 minutes. total time for the other crap they way they did it was a few hours.
The one hour machine people looked at the process and figured out that you could feed the negative machine straight from the film can. No need to reload them into bigger cans. Someone still sits there and analyzes each frame (they used to, computers do most of it now) and prints them. Still using that 1000 roll of paper. But what the one hour guys did was mak a machine to feed 3' at a time through a set of rollers that delivered the paper straight into the processing chemicals. The printer also put a tiny pin hole between each picture. Once the paper made its way through the chemicals and the drier, a laser sees the pin hole and cuts the picture. Between each customer's roll, two pinholes where punched, telling the machine to sort the pictures. Automation was able to take the several hours and turn it into a few minutes. Other than that, the actuall process used was identical. the big labs all predicted our fate, we could do it faster and cheaper, so our quality must be inferior. The fact is our quality was as good or better. Our machines were much better controlled than theirs and our color balancing systems were better. Not only were we faster and cheaper, we were as good or better. Oh yeah, those big labs? They are all gone. They could not understand that quality, speed and price are not codependant. They could not understand that they were just simply slow.
