SolveYourProblem.com Article Series: Photography Tips
I Want Some Photography Tips and Ideas

Where Should I Get My Prints / Photos Developed?

Three kinds of businesses do color-print photofinishing: mass-market labs, mini-labs, and custom labs. Amateur photographers use mass-market or mini-lab processing (or a combination of the two) almost exclusively.

Custom labs

Custom labs cater to professional and advanced amateur photographers, so they're expensive. They may also be hard to find. The work of top-notch custom labs, though, is routinely superior to the best automated photofinishing. Custom labs also provide services that are unavailable at popularly priced labs.

Mass-market photofinishing

Mass-market labs are what they sound like: industrial-sized places that develop and print lots and lots of film. Many of you are familiar with their services as "drugstore" photofinishing, not because the drugstore actually does the work but because you drop off your film at a retail store like a drugstore or perhaps a supermarket or discount store. From there, your film is picked up and whisked away to the big lab, developed and printed, put in envelopes, and then sent back to the retail store. These facilities may also be known as regional labs because they serve entire regions, perhaps several states. One of the biggest and best known of mass-market labs is Qualex, which is owned by Kodak and provides what's known as Kodak Premium Processing.

The great advantage of mass-market processing is low cost: High volume allows these outfits to do photofinishing at very competitive prices. For the same reason, mass-market labs almost always offer good deals on double print orders, as well as frequent promotions - free or low-cost reprints and enlargements if you have them process a certain number of rolls, for instance. These labs' drop-off points are probably also very convenient for you. They may be in the supermarket where you always shop, or in the shopping mall you pass every day on your way to work.

These labs do take a day (or two, or three) to process film. (Some drugstore and photo-booth operations offer same-day service if the film is in by a certain time, but you still have to make two stops.) Picking up your prints may be an inconvenience if you don't have food shopping or mall errands to do. And while most mass-market labs are careful about handling film, the possibility of loss is greater with them than it is with mini-labs, which do their processing right in the store.

But by far the greatest disadvantage of mass-market labs is that you get no personal service. You may hit it off with the sales clerk at the counter, but that person is just a sales clerk. If you ask to get a print redone - the negative goes back into an envelope and is returned to that big, anonymous lab. There, a person you'll never meet reads your instructions (or whatever else the sales clerk has scribbled on the envelope) and takes a guess as to how much lighter or darker or less blue you want your print. And then the negative and print make yet another trip back to the store.

The Mini-Lab

If you have a mini-lab in your neighborhood or town - and chances are you do - you've probably noticed that it has its own developing and printing machinery right on the premises. You drop off film there, it's processed there, and you pick up your prints there. As a result, mini-labs tend to provide much faster service, typically an hour or two.

The real tipoff of the mini-lab, though, is not turnaround time but equipment. The printing machine is almost always right out in the open. It's about the size of a large office photocopier, with a place at one end for an operator to sit at a kind of control panel and viewing screen. Some mini-labs arrange their hardware so that you can see the uncut strip of fresh prints feeding into a bin in the store window!

And right there is the great advantage of the mini-lab: Your prints are done in-house, not at some factory-sized lab 50 miles away. If you're dissatisfied with a print and want to get it reprinted, you can get it done there and then, right after you've looked through your envelope of prints. You can probably even talk to the person who was running the printing machine. If you have a question, or a complaint, or a suggestion, or just want to chew the fat about film and cameras, the mini-lab is where it's at. Photography is the mini-lab's business, not lawn chairs or cosmetics or groceries.

People like mini-labs for their fast service. It's great to drop off film on your way to lunch and pick up prints on the way back. But another big selling point of the mini-lab is quality. Overall - and as with everything in photography, there are lots of exceptions - mini-labs do a better job of printing than mass-market labs. And even if a mini-lab print doesn't look so hot, it's a simpler, faster, and more personal process to get it reprinted. Should a negative really prove impossible to print well (and it happens) a good mini-lab operator will take the time to explain it to you, perhaps even showing you what's wrong with the negative.

# # # # #

SolveYourProblem.com : 2007

> Home Page > Photography Tips: Main Page