[rollei_list] Re: Kodachrome and Dwayne's = OK for me !

At one time there were not one, but TWO indie labs in Chciago
processing Kodachrome, in the late 1980s.

After Kodak closed their own lab (which was usually referred to as
Prairie Ave., which was its address), the firm convinced a couple of
local labs to start their own.  Ross-Ehlert (at that time) had the
best pro E-6 line in town, and they started a separate K-14 line on
the near west side.

They did some fantastic work, and I recall they were offering
something like a four-hour turnaround time.  I still have some of the
film I processed there.

Meanwhile, La Salle Photo on the north side of town was already in a
long decline from their peak in the early 1960s.  Rather than being a
pro-oriented lab, La Salle tried to be a jack of all trades, catering
to the hundreds of drug stores and small camera shops in the area.

As minilabs came to become popular, La Salle's route business went
into a decline.  This was exacerbated when they started their own
chain of camera stores, going into direct dompetition against many of
their existing customers.

La Salle sunk about $1M in their Kodachome lab, which required
building a blast cap into the roof of their plant.  You had to keep a
chemist on staff full-time, as the chemistry had to be mixed from
scratch.

La Salle's K-14 line did good work as long as they had a good chemist
on hand.  But Kodak had greatly exaggerated the potential market for
Kodachrome processing, and they were never able to generate sufficient
volume from their customers to make the lab worthwhile- not even after
winning a contract from Wal-Mart to do their Kodachrome.

I worked for La Salle at the time.  If the owner had asked me my
opinion, I would have advised against it, since the market for
Kodachrome was already drying up even then- and this was 20 years ago.

The investment in a K-14 line was an almost total loss and was one
more contributing factor to La Salle going out of business soon after
the owner died in 1996.

Pros by then were using E-6 products, which they could get processed
downtown in about two hours.  The film was versatile and could be
pushed or pulled.  Fuji by then offered Velvia, which combined fine
sharpness with fast processing.

So, the pros largely did not switch to Kodachrome once Kodak started
offering it in 120 format, and whatever consumer market for the film
still existed continued to dry up.  Those people were by then mainly
shooting print film on vacations and such.

Both labs crashed and burned and delving into K-14 turned out to be a
big mistake for each.
---
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