nullfinder

damn right, everyone should order frontiers

Okay. Now that I'm not on my PDA.... We -have- a DSLR, a Rebel XT, now granted it's not a pro format camera it's still much better than the soccer mom cameras out there. I've played with it but I'm much like the crochety grandfather who still writes letters on the typewriter despite the grandchildren buying him a new pentium 4 computer. (and I'm only 20, LOL), I always return to my Rebel and Brownie. I don't like the digital look; never have, never will. One other thing that boiled my blood was that they just carelessly tossed the negs into the folder along with the prints. Just thrown in there like "whatever." How on earth do these people stay in business? I've seen other posts suggesting that they treat us film users so shittily because they want to force us into digital; for those poor uninformed people who use Funsavers and always get shitty results, they probably wind up buying a digital camera at the end. I am laughed at by everyone because I use film, but they're not laughing when I'm the one trying to recover their vacation photos because their computer got hit by a surge. I like to equate film and digital between grabbing a Big Mac and making a steak dinner yourself; the Big Mac is ready within minutes but the steak dinner is much more satisfying. I really wish I had been around in the early days of one hour... when children were not allowed to play with the machines...

Thank you for all of your sympathetic responses, i feel a lot better. i did indeed take the other cd back and got a bunch of whining about how "we're not a pro lab." more on that in a later post. we have a digital rebel, a rebel xT (the black one). i like the convenience and ease but i don't like the plastic look. i am a film zealot. i used to make that frontier sing operas, with crystal blacks and punchy colours, with absolutely ZERO quality complaints. i ran that damn lab as if it was my own, and i know i'll never get anything similar... i'll post more later.

Today was another one of those aneurysm-inducing experiences. Since I was

removed from my seat of power at Walgreens, I no longer have a Frontier at my

disposal and have been reduced to dropping film off at the Walmart for scan to

CD. Tell me... Please tell me.... how hard is "CD ONLY - NO PRINTS" written in

no less than 3 different places on the envelope to understand???? I see the

thickness and price of the envelope as the poor clerk brings it to the counter

and immediately begin to get a sinking feeling in my stomach, along with a

rhythmic pounding in the side of my head.

<p>

I stay quiet and pay for my order, minus prints, to avoid completely tearing

the head off of someone who doesn't really deserve my wrath.

<p>

I get home and it gets even worse..... I put the CD in and immediately go to

the pictures folder....... 22 images, for a grand total of LESS THAN

9MB!!!!!!!!!!!!!! WTF, JESUS MARY AND JOSEPH?!!!! To make matters worse,

nothing, not a damn thing was done to them; they all have an infuriatingly

milky yellow cast to them... I wound up breaking the CD and throwing it into

the trash. What am I going to have to do? Buy my own Frontier????? I have a

Perfection 3490 but it takes WAY, WAY too long (7-8 minutes) to scan ONE

image.... It makes me want to stop taking pictures.

what is the difference between metal and plastic... personal preference? i like plastic.. easier :P

<b><i>UPDATE:</b></i><br>

I emptied the developer and flushed the tank, cleaned the rack. I filled the tank with fresh developer repl solution from the khaki-coloured Qualex tote, and added the correct starter amount. Then after the solutions warmed up, I ran a blank test roll through (pulled half of it out and wound it back in again). The edge markings were there, faintly. The black part was barely visible.....<p>

(sound of monitor flatlining...)<p"><p>

 

I give up.

<i>"You're not really having a good time there are you?"</i><br>

No. Not at all. I keep using the doctor analogies... But imagine a heart doctor being forced to stay out in the waiting room and put bandages on paper cuts, while the heart patient is still on the table. Every now and then when there aren't any people with paper cuts the head nurse will let the doctor go back in and operate on the heart patient. That's basically how things are run. Someone who is less qualified than me (if she WAS more qualified, she would have done all the maintenance listed below [it shouldn't matter if you do just ONE god damn roll a day, the machines should ALWAYS be sparkly inside and out, ready for a 50 roll rush at any hour of the day or night] and not just say "OH well its a piece of shit, we need a new one") is in charge of the lab; she's the one who decides "we're open" or "we're closed." Their excuse is "we don't do enough rolls a day, so there's no need for someone to always be back here cleaning and doing stuff to the machine." NO. I don't get that. There isn't specifically any one in charge of the lab, no one to say "well i'm going to do the monthly maintenance" or "the machine is shooting fire, the lab is closed today." At first I thought that that was yhy they brought me in... But I'm disappointed and going in to work every day literally makes me ill. I feel terribly underutilized, photo is what I love to do and to see the blatant disdain towards the department makes me physically sick. <p>

 

<i>"that the developer tank has drained itself."</i><br>

No. It screeches at you when the level is about half an inch from the opening, trust me it would let you know right away if it had a leak.

<p>

<i>"Also might need to drain replenishment tank and clean."</i><br>

HA, heres a list of what I did when bringing it back to life

 

<p>

Drained, cleaned and flushed all processing tanks (film AND paper)<br>

Removed, drained, flushed and cleaned replenisher tanks (film AND paper)<br>

Removed, cleaned, and flushed water tank<br>

Cleaned replenisher tank level sensors (DIRTY, weren't letting them know when to put chems in)<br>

Cleaned area under replenisher tanks (rusting, slimy mess)<br>

Cleaned area around, and including bellows pumps<br>

Flushed replenisher and drain lines (film AND paper)<br>

Cleaned processing racks as best I could (film AND paper)<br>

Cleaned upper roller guides (film AND paper)<br>

Cleaned circulation filter area (film AND paper)<br>

Cleaned auto-washing nozzles<br>

Cleaned lighthouse and lens area of years of dust<br>

Updated the light source (new bulb)<br>

Calibrated replenisher pump output<br>

Cleaned film carrier rollers and masks, sensors<br>

Cleaned solution heater vent area<br>

Cleaned exterior casing<p>

Now tell me, is this something a pimple faced, metal mouthed 13 yr old with a summer job do? I spent 9 hours over 2 days doing all of this, and doing it extremely thoroughly. Yes the machine is still a bit dirty, but it is a VAST improvement, probably the most maintenance that's ever been done to it since it was brand new.

Today was my latest OMGWTF with this machine.

 

What on God's green earth would cause negatives to go from "okay," to blank in the space of 1 day?

 

The negs were coming out okay, but today someone brought film, another person put it through the machine and they came out extremely thin (the edge markings were this way too). I pulled half the film out of a sacrifice roll, then wound it back in and put it through. The entire, I repeat, entire roll came out crystal clear, no edge markings and no "half the roll that you pulled out is black." Just a light orange mask.

 

WTF?!!??!

Why would you want to throw away your negatives????

 

 

One thing I could not fathom is when some idiot customer would hand me back the negatives from their order and say "I don't want/need these, throw them away." The look I gave them was one that suggested they'd ask me to commit a mortal sin. I can never ever throw negs/trans away.

 

I always kept them in a drawer, with their name and phone number written on the sleeve. Sure enough some time later they'd come back and want reprints, and I'd give them back their negs that they tried to throw away with a "I told you you'd need them"

<i>"Machines like Frontier often blow up the contrast and clip highlights with print film and do the same thing with slide film only much worse."</i>

<p>

yeah, that's one thing I could never really do right. I scanned from velvia i shot once and it made HORRIBLE enlargements/prints. The colours were off, highlights were smashed but the contrast wasn't there. I was all fired up about having my beautiful Velvia shots of the botanical gardens made into 8x12s, only to see the first 4x6 proof come out looking like I hand drew it myself and used Crayola to colour it in. Poor frontier.

 

Strangely enough, it was able to scan some Sensia I shot in Colorado a couple of years ago, remarkably well

and SENT 1-2 off at a time, sorry

I hate to be the spoilsport but I don't think there's much hope, even for 25 and 64. From reading other threads about frozen film, etc you MAY have some luck but 10-20 years is a looooong time.

 

Shoulda skipped a couple of meals and 1-2 off at a time :P

<i>" Even on the Frontier I used to work on, I always went a tiny notch darker than I thought looked right on the screen, and in the actual print it was perfect"</i>

 

Yep. The monitor that's on the poor thing I used has been on continuously for almost 2 and a half years.. It has some phosphor burns (another thing I bitterly complained about) and is starting to fade to the point where you have to turn the brightness up to make it look good again. I always went one D step further and the tones were rich. Re the phosphor burns, each time I worked I would resize the screen a bit and shift it over to one corner or side, just so that the burns wouldn't get more severe.

 

The epson is acting up tonight so I'm not going to be able to post any scans.

In this case, the film was "store-use"d, I didn't pay for it *wink*

 

Anyway, I used to see quite a bit of this CVS film back at Walgreens, it was muddy yes but it never had that yellow cast. The roll i used has a Fuji-style teal and red line running the entire length of the film, under the frame numbers.

 

So, am i correct in assuming that the low-contrast is a part of living with optical minilabs? It seems so lifelike and sharp, but the contrast is severely lacking. It's also kind of unpredictable, if i hit +3D and the frame looks crystal black in the monitor, it'll come out sort of milky, not all blown out but still. one thing i like about working with this old gal is that even with underexposed negs there's no violent grain. i had reined in my frontier and turned off the 'soccer mom at the Kodak picture maker with Day glo fluorescent saturation' crap, optimized it to produce beautiful prints without the jaggies and day glo colours you guys hate the frontier for. i just hope they never have to do a restore to factory settings. they'll never know why it's suddenly producing such shitty prints.

 

anyway, i'll post some more examples later. thanks for the input though.

I shot that wide open ((4.5) at 400 speed. I politely disagree. The lights at my other job are the same brightness (a crisp, cool white); I've taken pictures before with Kodak Gold 200, again wide open. They came out much better than that, no horrible yellow tone. Look at the red of the totes. They're not that dull, they're much brighter than that. The floor is also a light grey. I guess what I'm asking is, in what step would contamination cause the yellow cast and poor contrast I am seeing. (Another roll of Gold 100 [totally unusuable - threw it away] looked the same).

the above shot was shot around 7-8 pm, right before dusk.

 

this next shot was indoors, in the "stockroom" area.<div></div>

All of you know about the QSS-2511 I posted about... I developed a few test

rolls and made some prints. All of which came with the same yellow, low contrast

results.

 

When you print them, you must use -Y correction (2-3 steps). The prints come out

bluish or magenta, depending on the shot, and super low contrast with muddy

colours. It almost looks like a Kodachrome nightmare. I don't think the

contamination is in the paper side, because the daily setup prints come out with

a healthy white/grey areas.

 

To answer your question about control strips, they are useless as I cannot

figure out how to get the densitometer working (Xrite 811 or 801 I think) with

that Windense software.

 

I have attached scans of the film. It's CVS brand film, shot with a Rebel 2000.

Scanned at 2400dpi, 48 bit colour on an Epson Perfection 3490. Sized down 50%

with mild grain reduction. Even stuff from Kodak funsavers comes out like this.<div></div>

another question, would it be OK to use the Fuji superwash granules in the replenishment water? I'm not sure how different the LORR is from the fuji chemicals. Just wondering.

"$.01 for Frontier scans is a ripoff."

 

be nice :)

yeah, I work at the one by the riverwalk. don't tell them I said anything about being disatisfied. But things completely changed today, I was allowed to spend basically my entire shift making poor old ritzy feel better, drained the printer tanks and scrubbed them out GOOD, there were 4-5 sheets stuck at the very bottom. I don't know HOW on earth that machine ran, really. The dev tank was black as night, etc etc. The stuff of nightmares.

 

but soon we'll be up again :) I just need to know how to mix the chemicals, and what to put in etc

I got fired from that cesspool Walgreens because I was so vocal about neglect and indifference towards both the machines and the quality of customer prints; I don't think this is going to be very much different either. I don't want to imagine how my once-sparkling Frontier looks (inside and out) now. Basically about the Noritzie, I was told "we're sending a tech in, don't worry about it, you can play when the tech is finished." That's kind of like a general practitioner walking through an airport, someone has a heart attack, and security says "you can't give him CPR, wait for the cardiologist to get here, but you can put a bandaid on his paper cut." That's how I feel. I am more than capable and willing to do the needed cleaning and restoration but I'm being told that I can't. The attitude towards the poor thing is that "that piece of shit breaks down all the time, we hate it, we want a new one," but yet there is no maintenance done, nothing at all (from the look of things). It's a vicious cycle; it breaks because no one cares, and no one cares because it breaks. On Sunday, at least 4 people asked me "do you do one hour, I need these pictures done," and it physically hurt me to say "no, we're down." It is both disheartening, disappointing and extremely upsetting that all I do is ring up 200-250 snotty tourists a day and am not allowed to do what I do best. I feel like a pit bull yanking and snapping at the chain, dying to be let loose; I feel purpose-less and misused because of the ZERO support and enthusiasm towards photo that pervades that store. The lab has been down for the past 3-4 weeks AT LEAST, and no one has cared at all.

At my new CVS there is a Noritsu QSS2501 which has been, to politely say it,

ignored and neglected.

 

How do I dump the replenishers???? The tanks look frightful and I want to

start over with completely new chemistry and replenishers. It looks like I

have to remove the clamped hoses and just let the tank drain.. didn't want to

do it this way for fear of not being able to put everything back leak-proof.

 

Also, what are those stirrer-rod looking things sticking out the side of the

repl tanks?

 

What chemical kits would be necessary to refill the machine with correct

chemistry? It has a Kodak kit, one big bottle for the paper side "Developer

Starter" and the other bottle is a smaller one, about the size of a Tmax

bottle that says "Film Developer" Starter. The one that's missing is the blix,

I don't know which one it is because there isn't one. Also, they have tubs

with sets of chemistry in them from Qualex. am I correct in assuming these are

the ones you dump in the Replenisher jugs?

 

Sorry if I sound stupid. I'm used to Frontier maintenance.. dump a tank, flush

it, put new filter, put part A, water, then part B :P

" don't bring it in on a sat./ sun., when its crowded. their only human."

 

why is it so hard for the pimple faced wretches to learn how to make proper photos? it's not that hard...

I do the last 2 :P

i guess. i don't have any problems with them. I for one think that my grandma could use it, LOL