[Photo Engineer]

MattKing, your answer is incredibly stupid. Are you aware of the fact that there are many international memebers on APUG, like me, who are not english native speakers? That complicates the things a little bit, maybe you would know if you spoke more languages. Anyhow, if drylab (which, by the way, is not even a word that one could look up in the dictonary) is the dry part of a darkroom, the linguistic variation is not so obvious, I mean, after all it could mean something else besides an inkjet printer. I hope your snobism has given you a nice life, and will improve it with time.

At Kodak, we had a "dry side" and a "wet side" denoting the separation of photosensitive materials and processing chemicals respectively. This was rigidly enforced. There was no dry lab, but there were wet labs outside of the darkroom. The term dry lab is recent. Since I sometimes do mixed analog negative to digital printing, you might say I am in my dry lab right now!

Sometimes, the term "dry lab" is often used by EEs and MEs as well as Physicists when they refer to their lab. They have totally dry labs, whereas chemists always have wet labs.

PE