Do highstreet labs process 35mm film with digital equipment?

[fella_road]

<p>I got some 35mm fujifilm film developed at Boots in London, UK the other day. The pictures that came back looked very much like the digital pictures I've been processing in the last few years. When I look at old family snaps on film from the early 90s the quality of the processing looks so much better. Are highstreet processors now using digital equipment to process 35mm film? and has this lowered the quality? Any suggestions on where I can go?</p>

<p>Thanks!</p>

[john_shriver]

<p>Mini-lab printing has been digital for 15-20 years by now, using a film scanner, digital color correction, and digital printing. The Fuji Frontier mini-lab really revolutionized that approach, and it can produce excellent results. (In the hands of a twit, it can also produce dreadful results.)<br>

More likely what has happened is that this mini-lab's printing volume has fallen low enough that they may have switched from photographic paper output to ink-jet or dye sublimating printing, which can be very pixelated and low quality. Historically, minilabs did digital exposure of RA-4 paper using colored lasers (Fuji) or colored light-emitting diodes (Noritsu), and that produced very high-resolution results. But many are now going "dry", and using rather iffy printers.</p>

[eric_s7]

<p>Yes, they do use digital equipment for printing. Those huge-sized machines, which are equipped with a small monitor, keyboard and mouse are especially bad. When film strips are fed into the machine, they are actually scanned into jpeg files before being printed. The prints that I got from them had filenames with "jpg" extension printed on the back.I once had the opportunity to see the printing being done before me. When I noticed that they had missed out one frame from the printing, they promised to do that for me right away. To my horror, they told me that the negatives were not needed anymore, as the pictures were stored inside the machine. When the picture was retrieved, I could see how the worker adjusted it for brightness, saturation, contrast etc in just same way that you would do on your computer. Needless to say, I had stopped going back to that lab again. I believe those smaller and less sophisticated printing machines of other labs are of the digital type as well, although the output is more acceptable. I believe labs that do prints with traditional enlargers just do not exist anymore. Very sad indeed. </p>

[photo5]

<p>You can find specialty labs, here in Seattle there are still a couple old fashioned labs that use enlargers. Pandalab and Moon Photo. They aren't cheap, but they are very good. Also Capitol Hill Photo Express has some good custom printers still working. I've taken my prints to Costco for the past 24 years and their quality has gone up a bunch in the past 15 years. The particular Costco I go to did not begin scanning negs until about 8 years ago, however. When they did, I could really tell the difference, and some were horrible, but most are fine.</p>

[john_shriver]

<p>Note that the majority of the optical printing mini-labs stunk. Only one had decent enlarging lenses, the rest couldn't keep a 4x6 prints sharp in the corners. The digital mini-labs were a big step UP in quality.<br>

There is nothing inherently wrong with the JPEG file format. Disk space is cheap, they don't use heavy-handed compression on them, and the file size for a 4x6 print is small in the first place.<br>

I maintain my expectation that the "problem" in this case is that the mini-lab has been converted to "dry" printing.</p>

[mike_pallas]

<p>Interesting subject for me because I started in the mid 80's and have seen the full range of Lab services since then. I agree that the Fuji Frontier was a revolution in quality when it cam on the market and used by Pro-Labs, I couldn't believe the results. <br>

The problem is, as photographers we are often kept out the loop when it comes to Lab operations, equipment and so on. I only learned about the different Lab working practises when I got close to a mini-lab owner who loved tech talk. <br>

Like you I have experienced a broad range of competencies in the Lab processing world. At one lab I worked with I noticed some weeks good quality and other weeks mediocre. It turned out to be that on some occasions they were scanning the film at lower resolutions and other weeks high resolution. The difference between the 2 was immense and this was a Pro Lab. What annoyed me was they were doing this with wedding material which isn't really good enough. Other photographers had similar complaints with this lab.<br>

Anyway, I switched to digital capture for weddings and that resolved the problem. If the lab is going to digitize your negs into crappy low-rez files then why bother with film.</p>