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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.
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SolveYourProblem.com : 2007
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