How to reduce film print cost

Hi people,

Here is my problem...

Recently my wife insists that I switch from slide to color prints film and

develop them in a pro lab for my son. Each set of prints costs me more than $20

and (vs $10 for slides), and she only chooses a handful of them to keep.

Question: What is the sound way to reduce cost? Some suggest I invest a $700

Canon scanner, scan developed films and prints only the best ones my wife wants

to keep. Sounds a good idea? My concern is that I am saving for a professional

digital camera so I can use my Nikon lenses I invested over the years and am

therefore reluctant to invest a scanner.

Please advice.

I'm not totally sure about the question - is the issue that she wants prints of a few selected pictures, or she wants prints of all of them so she can decide which ones to keep?

 

JBQ

At what size are you getting the prints done? I would think that even small 1 hour labs would be able to produce 4x6s as proofs for a lot less than $20/roll.

 

Or you could always just have a contact sheet made and evaluate them with your loupe just as you would with slides....that approach has been used for years.

I think you can get prints made at a good lab for less than $20

Look around for a lab that does not just cater to pro photographers but that is serious about photography.

My local camera shop processes on sight and will do a roll of 24 for around ten bucks. They do a much better job than the local supermarket or drugstore.... They don't have quite the range of paper selection that a real pro lab might have.... but they do a good job

see what you can find in your area

What if you got a contact sheet so your wife can select what shots she would like printed from it?

I agree with Rob. My local pro lab develops and prints a contact sheet (digital contact

sheets-yuck), for about $8. From that it's easy to choose which photos to actually

print, and the net is usually quite low.

 

I tolerate the digital contact sheets because the lab location is convenient.

Thanks for your informative advice.

I live in DC area and yet to find a decent lab for less.

When you talk about contact sheet, do you mean index prints?

I guess the one thing I would like to let my wife believe is that slides are better than prints (OK, she agrees that slides are better in picture quality. But the thing that keeps her from slides is that the hassle of setting up the projector or using light table and a loupe. More important, it is not that convenient to share the pics with our friends).

<i>"(OK, she agrees that slides are better in picture quality. But the thing that keeps her from slides is that the hassle of setting up the projector or using light table and a loupe. More important, it is not that convenient to share the pics with our friends)"</i>

 

<p>The reality that you're identifying here is one that many people miss, in a number of ways.

 

<p>You can't let quality be the one and only arbiter of a given choice -- in this case slides vs prints. The quality edge gained by shooting slides isn't worth much if you and/or your wife end up getting less enjoyment out of viewing and sharing your photos. <u>Nice</u> photos that you and your family can enjoy viewing and sharing, or slightly <u>nicer</u> slides that get put away in a box and rarely if ever looked at -- which is "better"?

See if the lab offers enlarged contact sheets. 11x14 or 16x20. This might be a

cheaper way to go.

I'd find a reliable Walmart or Costco lab(not necessarily an oxymoron)and simply use the 4x6 machine prints as proofs for possible enlargements. Sounds like your wife is fed up with you futzing around with slides, loupes, screens and projectors just to look at a few photographs--been there and back.Think long-term: if you burn her out on your photography habit now, you'll never see that digital Nikon SLR!

I'm with Gary. I take my film to Costco for developing and 4x6 prints for about $4 a roll. They have yet to screw up my negs, and I look at these 4x6s as proofs. Sometimes the prints are good enough to pass around, sometimes not. If not, I go to a pro lab for 4x6s of the keepers. Either way, larger prints are made by the pro lab. Saves me $$$ and time (pro lab is 1/2 hour away).

 

The difficulty with this scheme is keeping in mind that the original 4x6 proofs may not show the potential of your shots. If you can ignore poor colors/contrast/etc to see the geometry/framing/relationships/moment/etc (includes looking directly at the negs to check exposure, sharpness), then this can save you some $.

I think much depends on the total volume of prints you expect to make over the next few years and the size of the prints. I opted to shoot slides because the print processing labs generally provide a poor quality product. After investing $1600 in a Nikon LS-4000 scanner (now selling for $1200) and $700 in an Epson 2200 printer I can print better than average photos with archival inks and paper at sizes up to 13 X 19. I like this process because I now have creative control over the entire process except for developing the slide film. I rely on the Fuji lab in Phoenix to do this for me using mailers that I buy from B&H and their lab does very nice work. Once the slides are in my hands I can easily produce prints of much nicer quality than I can get at Costco or Wal Mart, and I can produce enlargements if I desire. Admittedly the up-front cost is high, but it is very comforting not to have to depend on sub-standard processors to deal with my photos.

Get the wife a nice $500-600 digicam where she can shoot and edit the prints she wants, then have them Frontier printed which typically produces outstanding quality. Most women dig digicams.

 

You can keep your film gear and do what you want with it, or go big fancy digital SLR because at that point she'll be accustomed to using hers, and the door will be open - wink, wink, nudge, nudge.

 

You're going to end up spending the money either way dude, so at least choose the option with the highest SAF (spousal approval factor). If you think getting contact sheets made and squinting at them with a loupe is a good option, you might me in for a lot of nights doing the dishes solo.

 

Cheap labs = you get what you pay for.

One solution might be to join Ofoto and get some film mailers from them. (Go there through one of their ads on PhotoNet and the site will make a little money!). For $3.95 a roll, Ofoto (a) processes your negs (b) scans them and puts them on-line and © mails the processed negs back to you. You can look at them on-line in larger sizes than any contact sheet -- and order prints on-line from Ofoto. You can even crop and make other modest corrections on-line. Alternatively, you can get prints made from the negatives they send you back. The negs come nice and clean and carefully wrapped.

How to reduce film print costs? Do what many pro wedding photographers (amongst others) are doing - go digital, now. Shoot all the pictures you want, bring them up on the computer, decide which ones you/your wife want prints of, copy them to a CD or floppy and have the prints made. With a digital camera you will find yourself shooting a lot more, no worries about how many shots are left on a roll of film, how many rolls of film you have, etc. Whatever you put on the flash card is free. If you don't like it, delete it then and there.

I have used two approaches to reducing printing costs.

 

<p>The first is to send film to <a href="http://www.dalelabs.com">Dale Labs</a> and order slides only. That costs $8.50 (for 36 exposures) plus either $2 per roll or $4.75 flat-rate for return shipping (they have postage-paid mailers). You get negatives and slides. This is considerably cheaper than good-quality printing, and the slides give a much better indication of the quality of the negative than a 4x6 print.

 

<p>The downside is the amount of time it takes using the mail. I have had problems with severely delayed arrival of the film at the lab (they're in Florida, I'm in California) to the point where I now will only send film using FedEx. Unfortunately, the added cost makes it practical only when I have a large batch of film to process.

 

<p>When I don't have enough film to FedEx to Dale, (i.e., no more than or two rolls), I take it to a local mini-lab for C-41 processing without prints. That costs about $4 per roll. Then I make low-resolution scans of all the negatives using VueScan's batch scanning function. From there I can choose negatives for high-resolution scanning. Obviously, I already have a scanner, so it's a somewhat practical option for small amounts of film (I'd go bonkers if I had to batch-scan ten rolls at once, one strip of four negatives at a time).

Give Sam's Club a try, the one I use has a Frontier for one hour work and a really cheap 4 day service for what they send out. Last time I think the one hour was @$6 and the 4 day was about $3 for 24 exp. Take the negs you like to the local lab for enlargements.