What Chromira ProLab
Owners are saying:

"Life after getting our Chromira ProLab
has been a pleasant surprise.
Production Savings Equal My Lease Expense!"
Mid-South Color Inc. Brooks Clayton, Owner

Over the past 8 years, Chromira users, industry professionals and ZBE staff have gotten together to share their ideas, experiences, and have some fun at the annual Chromira Users Group Summer Bash. A key highlight was this year's session on Business Development and Marketing, which included a presentation by Brooks Clayton of Mid-South Color Lab (a Full Service Portrait/Imaging Lab) called Life after the ProLab. Brooks offered key insights into how the Chromira ProLab is growing his business... Here are the highlights.

"To me, the decision to purchase was a no brainer. I had done my homework and calculated that I could reduce my labor expense by two employees and I knew the continuous cutting, sorting, and order assembly would really speed up my in-house turnaround time.

Now, after only 12 months, my business and profitability have actually changed more than I would have imagined. Now I have an even workflow with none of the production bottlenecks I used to have. That means virtually no overtime, totally predictable production scheduling, and flexible production capability even in our Peak Season.

Reduced paper waste was a real plus. Since all print sizes are imaged from one 30? roll every print is always a perfect match. This is huge! I never have redo?s because of size matching. Even if I am making a wallet and a 30x40 from the same image, they are perfect matches. And the print nesting features eliminate most of the waste.

Labor Savings; the reality was a big surprise. While I expected to cut my production labor expense, what has actually happened is my production labor has reduced to the point where one person does what it took three people to do?.and the one person does it faster and better. And the smoother workflow since we got the ProLab has allowed my print finishing staff to handle more work.

The ProLab gives me very fast turnaround times and allows me to bring in new customers without increased overhead. My former 2-3 day production order workflow used to take 12-14 hours for a normal cycle and now our standard turnaround for printing is less than 90 minutes. But I can very easily produce a completed order in 15 minutes whenever needed?without a lot of paper waste.

But I think that I was most surprised to find that we are saving over $300 per month in our cost of utilities: water, electricity, heating and cooling over our historical costs because the machine is so efficient and runs so cool.

As for quality, our Chromira printers have always given us the color, resolution and consistent quality we needed for our most discriminating customers but we now see much more neutral and consistent B&W portraits on color paper.

But the bottom line is what really counts and that is what wasn't a big surprise. The Chromira ProLab's capabilites all added up and just made a lot of business sense. And after owning the ProLab for over a year, the bottom line for me is that production savings equal my lease expense...it's just about a wash each month which is great. But even more important is the ProLab is giving me the productiivty tools and time to grow my business profitably." Brooks Clayton,

Miami, FL

Photo Pro Inc. Miami
Dan & Marysol Oria, Owners

"We’ve been running the ZBE Chromira 5xLab for 5 months now! Thanks to your excellent staff especially to James, Rich, Thomas and Jake! They truly are a great team! They have earned my trust.

As far as the printer … The ZBE 5XChromira Lab is in a class all by itself… It truly is all you say it is!  One “Revolutionary” Printer does it all!  The ZBE renders photographs that are a very close match to our Frontier Lab. I love the space saving design. No clumsy paper magazines to deal with and back-printing on all the sizes from 4x5 to 30 X 100. Modular design makes it easy to access any area. All this and made here in the good ‘ole USA with mostly American parts! Thanks ZBE…" Daniel Oria

San Diego, CA

Chrome Digital
Tim Bee, Owner/Partner

"Chrome has been very happy since September 2007 with completion of our Prolab 30 installation.
The print quality with the  very fast processing speed and zero color management issues is fantastic!
The Prolab 30 has been a great addition to Chrome's service offerings.  Cheers..." Tim Bee