In article ,
"dooey" writes:

"Mike Jenkins" wrote in message
...
Thanks to everyone who responded.

I got a photo negative scanner and discovered the negatives were FABULOUS.
Most of the images were loaded with color and details. The processing was
simply horrible. I guess you get what you pay for if you are in a hurry.
The scanned images are just fine.

If the negs were ok than you can't blame the processing.

This is a semantic issue. Mike was clearly using "processing" to mean
both developing the film and creating prints (or CDs) from the film.
IMHO, that's a perfectly valid usage. You're using it to refer to
developing the film only. IMHO, that's also perfectly valid, but it's
obviously not how Mike was using the term, so responding as if he were
using it that way isn't very productive.

If you have a
problem with the printing why not ask them to reprint? If a lab has never
met you before and your prints aren't great their not going to question the
fact when they pack them.

The assumption here is that the lab actually has ongoing one-on-one
relationships with its customers, and CARES about those relationships.
That may be true of the average pro lab, but I doubt if it's true of the
average lab in a drug store. I'd also contend that any lab should do SOME
quality control on what it puts out, whether or not it has an ongoing
personal relationship with you. If they know you and the types of photos
you bring to them, they may be able to do a better job at quality control,
but that doesn't excuse poor quality control if they don't know you.

Perhaps the operator hit the wrong channel button,
perhaps they had a fault on the machine etc. A lab is only poor if they
can't or won't put it right.

I don't agree. To take an extreme hypothetical example, if prints come
out with lime green skin tones, the operators should certainly at least
check their calibration, whether or not they've ever met you. If they
don't double-check the results, or if they find that they erred but don't
run the prints through again before you ever see them, then they qualify
for the adjective "poor," IMHO. If they give you the green-skinned prints
*AND* refuse to reprint them, that just makes them poor at customer
service, too. Put another way: If I have to come back to a lab to have
them redo half the shots on every roll, time after time, they won't earn
any praise from me, even if they happily redo every print I ask to be
redone. This hypothetical lab does a poor job at printing, even if it's
good at customer support.

That said, Mike's photos are of unusual subjects (namely, they're
underwater photos) that might not be handled well by the average
automated equipment. Personally, I'd be more willing to cut the lab some
slack on getting poor results from such a roll than from poor results on
typical snapshots. Still, I won't argue with Mike's statement that "the
processing was simply horrible," particularly since I've not seen the
prints.

--
Rod Smith,
http://www.rodsbooks.com
Author of books on Linux, FreeBSD, and networking