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Old May 26th 04, 05:26 PM
Bill Tuthill
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Default Not happy with prints from Kodak T400CN

Michael Weinstein wrote:

On 2004-05-26 06:17:25 -0400, (Phil) said:
I've been trying the C41 process films. The first lot I had developed
in a 'pro' lab and was fairly happy with, but just got contact sheets
so I could later on decide which to get printed. The second lot I had
done in a normal lab and had prints done, and they were awful! There
was no tonal variation, everything was either black, white or one
shade of grey. I'm not really expreienced enough to tell from the
negatives how they'd look printed properly.


My experience with all the C41 B&W films is that unless a pro lab does
the printing on b&w paper the pictures all have a sickly off color
cast. I suppose it's possible to print true black and white on color
paper in the standard lab system, but no one seems to do it.


T400CN is two generations ago. Kodak introduced Portra 400BW and its
amateur equivalent Select BW+ to make it easier for optical minilabs
to print on normal color paper via orange mask. The orange masks on
T400CN and especially Ilford XP-2+ aren't strong enough to support
regular RA-4 paper without color shift. Kodak recently replaced both
T400CN and 400BW with BW400CN, I believe.

Short-term answer for your remaining rolls of T400CN is to find a
digital minilab (Agfa d-Lab2, Fuji Frontier) and ask them to produce
either sepia or grayscale, whichever you prefer.