At NYU we have access to a host of world-class resources. First among them are of course the people; the professors and colleagues we share are some of the best and brightest in an incredible array of fields. They’re hard to forget about. Tucked away among the New York City empire NYU has amassed, however, are tons of other incredible resources that are a lot easier to never take advantage of, and LaGuardia Studio is one of them
The Studio specializes in 3-D and large format printing, and is home to powerful scanning equipment as well. The machines there are relatively standard across commercial production lines, but of course the Studio is anything but commercial. That students have access (if even for a potentially steep price) to such state of the art tech is insane; you know you’re tech is legit when Bjork comes through to your basement to have her entire body scanned. While I personally don’t have a huge amount of familiarity with 3-D printing or modeling, nor the time at present to learn, knowing that my purple ID can get me in for years to come is a good feeling.
The one service that the studio does provide that piqued my interest was the availability of large format photo printers. Though we students still have to pay the price of the paper, the ink is free, and the service fee is nominal, making this the absolute best way to make large prints, and makes it possible at all for someone like me who has very little experience in the field. I would never normally consider printing one of my photos any larger than say 18x24, but if the economic barrier to entry is so low, why not go big and see where it takes me?