More about E6 processing

[Brian]

Mostly for our UK members - dlab7, which is the processing department of 7dayshop.com, says it will not accept E6

films for processing after 1 December 2008. A sign of the times, I'm afraid. I will be looking for another supplier. Any

recommendations for good, reliable, cheap UK labs?

[richard_baines]

Peak Imaging - its more expensive than DLAB7, £5.19 I think for dev/mount, and they charge £2.50 postage, but its a freepost address so you only pay on the return journey (as opposed to just the send journey like Dlab7). If you only need sleeving though its somewhere around £3.60 I think, and their bulk discounts are very good. Very quick turnaround, when I dispatch on monday I get the slides back wednesday.

[garethspics]

Another vote for Peak Imaging. My last film from Dlab7 had a couple of nasty spots on it, so pehaps they are winding down their maintenance a bit. Fortunately Peak do other formats too and have always done a vey good job for me.

[Brian]

<P>I've heard good things about Peak Imaging quality before now. Unfortunately they do like to make a profit on postage: they use a Freepost address but I think you're paying for it out of that £2.50 (and then some).</P> <P>I have a local store that sends out to a Colorama lab, which is not bad, and costs about the same as Peak minus the postage.</P> <P>There's a local Jessops but they are strictly a last resort - they lost one of my films and scratched several others before I abandoned them.</P>

[richard_baines]

Peak Imaging might make a profit on small orders, but they also receive plenty of large orders. When I got back from Canada I paid for 15 rolls of e-6 to be processed and mounted, the postage was still £2.50 - it would have cost them way more than that to send all those slides back to me. I remember at the time, that the cost difference between sending the slides to DLab7, weighted against having to wait up to 10 days and having the extra worry of film having to be sent an extra journey because Guernsey is offshore, was negligible, especially after the 15% discount I got from Peak Imaging for sending 15 rolls in at once.

 

Assuming sending the film to them costs about £1 if they didn't have freepost, you'd only be paying £1.50 for them to send film back to you which I think is pretty reasonable if your slides are mounted.

 

With regard to quality, I've found both labs to be about the same in occasional blips, and any slight cosmetic damage that results from Peak processing (I've only ever had a few little black line smudges on one or two rolls) is usually more repairable in photoshop than that from other labs.

 

Its also quite convenient being able to send them other types of film, the order I'm expecting from them comprises of 1 x 35mm Velvia, 1 x 35mm Delta 3200 and 1 x 120 roll HP5+. I don't know of any other labs where I could mix film types as easily and cheaply as this, and still qualify for discounts (the multiple roll discount works even if you mix formats or developer requirements I think).

 

What I'd really love would be if Peak Imaging took up K-14 processing for Kodak so I didn't have a 10 day wait for Kodachrome 64 any more!

[mike_hitchen]

have you tried Colab in Coventry? It is £4.46 per 36 roll of E6

http://www.colab.com/traditional/film_processing.aspx

 

I don't think they do K-14 but these guys seem to:

http://www.processc22.co.uk/

 

Mike