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Old December 6th 07, 06:44 AM posted to rec.photo.equipment.35mm
H.S.[_2_]
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Posts: 18
Default film quality for different speeds

Norm Fleming wrote:


Unless you are planning to do the dark room work including optical printing
(or high resolution film scanning/digital printing) yourself, don't bother.
It you take your film for commercial processing these days, the film will be
developed and digitally scanned at the lowest possible resolution, and you
will be given very poor quality digital prints that have no detail
whatsoever, noticable pixels and wierd colours and look like something
produced in your grandpa's bathroom in the 1950s. This will negate any
advantage offered by any specific film, or for that matter by any particular
lens. Graininess, speed etc will mean next to nothing when the film is
subjected to this lowest common denominator process.
And I am not talking only about Walmart/Drugstore processing here. In the
largeish city where I live, there are several "proper" photo stores that
cater to the professional trade. Only one continues to do traditional
optical printing from film, and at an extremely high cost.
I am still interested in film photography but gave up darkroom work years
ago. And I can't get too excited about doing endless high resolution film
scans that take up hours of time and masses of memory.
You might like to play with some slide film though. It's all end-point
chemistry and so it's difficult for processors to screw up and you will get
direct, optical, high resolution images.




Here is an interesting tidbit. I wanted to get a few negative films
scanned to a CD. The films were already developed. I took a couple from
the set to a professional photo studio. They gave me a quote of, IIRC,
$1.5 (Canadian) per frame. Out of curiosity, I asked what was the size
of the scanned images in pixels. The guy wasn't sure. He was the manager
himself! Bad sign. Anyway, I picked up the film and the CD next day,
only to notice that the scanned images were 1800x1200 and that there
were a few scratches on my film that weren't there earlier in addition
to a few thumb prints. That left me with some bad taste in my mouth.

Next, I gave a similar job to a drugstore nearby. The guy who works in
the photo section there also wasn't able to tell me what size of images
they scan, but when I got my scans back, they were 3072x2048 pixels. I
noticed that they used a Noritsu scanner and were taking care of all the
films and stuff with those special gloves and other things.

Since then, I just go to that drug store to get my prints and scans
done. The same guy works there, being going there for the last four
years now, and appears to be experienced and interested in the job. He
also avoids any "touching" to the contrast/brightness if I request him
not to.

So, I know most of the film and photo advanced users here always
recommend going to a pro shop for good results, but my experience here
has been the opposite. However, if you really think about it, it just
shows that good workers are not necessarily found in pro shops only. Oh,
did I mention that the job in the drug store cost me less than half of
what I had to pay the pros? The only thing that the drug store doesn't
do is slides. So not much choice there.

Finally, that drug store is a chain. They have another location a few
blocks away. I gave a job there and got much smaller scans, I think they
were around 640x480! So, there is no consistency across the locations,
but at least there is some in the same location.

So from my experience, one has to do some leg work to see which shops
can give you good results.


regards,
-HS