How has getting photos developed become such a racket?

inroads? I don't know *anyone* who still develops photos. Not even grandmas/mil's. seriously.

Also CVS customer service sucks balls everywhere all the time in my experience. (they also bought out eckerds)

Not even millionaires? As for Kodak's business woes, I could sympathize more if they could bother actually running a business. I mean for real, once you can't turn around a roll of film in five days, shouldn't you just go ahead and close operations and stop kidding yourself?

um isnt this thread complaining abt how it doesn't work just fine

Well, it kinda was until I moved to this CVS monopoly town. My point was more that the camera works fine and that it just astounds me that everyone's expected to throw away their equipment and start over with something that in many ways is still much much worse (certainly at the entry level - $100 point and shoot film cameras blow away $100 point and shoot digital, no comparison). I understand the march of progress yadda yadda, but I guess what I'm really struck by here is the way that film has become such a niche market in such a short time. That and the fact that a drug store feels so comfortable offering a service and then just puking on you, which to me feels like the salient issue here moreso than my apparent moron caveman insistence on wanting to pay people money to provide services that they advertise.

also someone call me when digital has a storage medium with half the long-term reliability of 35mm negatives ok thx bye

also you may be able to use yr lenses on a digital body

what's wrong with an external hard drive?

truly I think you're fighting a losing battle here. Your complaints are understandable but they're never going to be fixed b/c there's no longer a demand/market for the services you want. It's like complaining you can't easily find turntable needles anymore.

I get 3-day turnaround on medium-format C41 and E6 if I turn it in at the right time (Monday or Tuesday), but that has to be picked up, taken to Dallas, and brought back.

also someone call me when digital has a storage medium with half the long-term reliability of 35mm negatives ok thx bye
Dude, C41 negatives are abysmal as far as archival standards go. Digital images don't degrade or pick up new flaws as time wears on (if stored intelligently) - whereas all negatives (even archival) are prone to scratches and dust appearing at every opportunity.

Everyone here is basically OTM!

the drugstore doesn't develop the film; they send it out to Kodak.

I get mine done at a Kodak Colortek center. It's v. expensive but they're v. good.

Still can't film for black and white contrast.

xpost: they don't have time

people only really do this w/b&w

BUT THEY OFFER THEM! Jeez, I didn't want/expect this to turn into me being the one defender of film holding back the tide - like I said, I expected film to become a niche medium (though not this fast) - what I was complaining about was them offering a service "Two Day" that they can't remotely be bothered to provide!

Most people who are really dedicated to photography develop their own film.

This isn't true AFAIK - setting up a color darkroom isn't exactly in the same budget league as having a decent 35mm shooting system.

(ps "if stored intelligently" equals what exactly? CDs rot within 10-20 years, hard drives fail, etc etc - negatives can get beat up if you don't take care of them but at least they are a physical object - I can still get great images from negatives my parents took on my same camera in 1972, I STRONGLY doubt I'd have anything to work with if digital had been around back then)

right

This is, perhaps, why I just shoot Polaroids and Holgas these days.

I like how owning a bunch of expensive digital storage devices that require software (which changes constantly), upgrades, maintenance, and a power supply just to work is somehow considered "superior storage" to a physical object that does not degrade over decades and requires basically nothing besides a plastic sleeve to be stored successfully.

The software to open TIFF files will be around for decades. NEF is a bit more questionable (Nikon could always go out of business), but if everyone adopts DNG, software will again be irrelevant.
Today, I can open PNG, TIFF, DNG, NEF, etc. et al. without the use of any software not built into OS X.

first for everything.

"taking up power" vs. "environmental pollution from chemicals"

awww xp

you can't say that about anything digital. basically you're committing to backing up everything you own in 3, 5 and 10 year cycles for the rest of your life, or it'll go away.

it may be pointless to complain about it, but I'm just as annoyed as Dr Casino about all of this at having to make adjustments for something far less secure

Film scanners have, for all intents and purposes, ceased development outside of inferior flatbeds (which aren't really advancing so much as geting a reintroduction with new 'features' for more money).

It's not unreasonable in the future to expect that mini-lab machines that accept color film directly will have gone the way of the dodo (along with RA4 chemistry for wet prints), which could very well mean that you have no good way to make prints from color negatives outside of boutique operations catering to antiques (read: expensive).

You'd be stepping in to fill a burning community need and making many people happy, who, in their gratitude, will bury you under tonnes of money. IOW, open a camera shop with 24-hour developing and good service, and if you don't deliver as promised, the prints are free!!! So get hopping, sir, get hopping!

Why assume that TIFF will exist? Because it's a standard and there's no ongoing development or production work involved. You don't have to spend money to keep the thing alive. (Nor does Adobe have any reason to abandon the TIFF as a storage format - with HDs growing rapidly, you don't need to worry about creating smaller uncompressed files.)

Whereas you actually have to produce film-quality scanners - a market that's already small, getting smaller and in most ways outpaced by simply shooting digital in the first place.

>>it's a very fair point to say that if you take a negative out of a drawer that you haven't touched for 30 years, it'll still 'work'

>No, it's not.

you're being a stickler -- yes it'll be faded but it will physically be there, there will be something to retrieve even if it isn't perfect, it will not be outright dust. I'm not an expert on C41 negatives but when I take my grandmother's 60's & 70's negatives out of that shoebox and hold them up to the light, I can see the images on them. Maybe a hard drive that's been in a closet for 40 years will still work when you plug it in, take the risk -- all I'm saying is digital actually means _more work_ for archiving.

all your points are taken, I'm certainly not saying anyone has any choice but to adopt. I'm just sympathetic to the vertigo.

this is true! but the mindless convenience more than outweighs the hassle.

It just sounds like more work (HD and HD and DVD) because digital gives you more options to protect your work. Before, if your negatives faded too far (or were scratched to oblivion, or burned in a fire, or got attacked with fungus or simply disappeared)(and many do 'fade to dust' if improperly processed) you were stuck with whatever prints were available to make lower-quality internegatives.

Now, if you're a hobbyist you've got multiple sets of 'negatives' and if you're a pro you've probably got multiple sets including offsite storage in case of disaster.

if your grandmother put her photographs of her early life in a box in 1955, and your mom didn't even know about it, it'll be there in the attic when you clean the house after her death

if you do the same with a set of data discs, without your kids to dutifully migrate the data every 5-20 years, when your grandkid opens the box 60 years later, there are no photographs

so, print everything out, have fun with digital (anyone putting off investing in one shouldn't, they're one of the most fun things in the world)

Funnily enough, we had pretty much the same situation in my family's household over the holidays this past time around - HUGE box of my grandmother's photos that everyone insisted had gotten lost or water-damaged a few moves ago, I went hunting around in the attic, found the damn thing, started touching up the highlights to share with the family. Didn't touch the negatives or the slides yet - no scanner for that at parents' place - but what a treasure trove!

It's rather unfortunate that everyone went to camcorders and color negatives rather than shooting Kodachrome and Plus-X in 35mm and Super8. We stand a much greater chance of losing chunks of our family/personal history from 1970-2005 than we do from 2005-2040.

http://static.flickr.com/32/59812776_6af6256eb9.jpg

when was the last time you saw one? 1987?

Kodachrome is lovely film, quite apart from its archival qualities - it has a luminance and saturation to its colours that few C41 films achieved.

In the end, hilariously, it turned out that my photos were behind the counter the whole time, just filed in the wrong drawer or something and hence unnoticed by buffoon employees.

Eleven months later (ie yesterday), I bought a digital camera (mainly for workflow reasons - I'm still lugging around my film gear for actual, like, photographs). Cord Camera's prices are more than worth it for reliable fast turnaround on negs, and I relish the time spent with my reasonably good film scanner (def not a "flatbed with a light built into the top" - what was I thinking?) to get really gorgeous (IMO) results.

The hobby survives.

digital cameras obv. are great and convenient, but people were being damn obtuse upthread about the inherent dangers in digital archiving.

yay, backup paranoia!

Not unfounded. I prefer printouts myself . Digital storage is not reliable imo.

I bought a digital camera mainly because the cost of developing film had skyrocketed. And the place I got films developed fired the attractive Polish woman who worked there. Unfortunately I still have a mountain of undeveloped films. Disaster.

i've spent ridiculous amounts of money on film processing in the last few years, probably in no small part because i feel i need to get three pictures of anything, and then doubles of those. the delete function, now that i have one, is pretty nice.

I fear my use of the delete function and hope it will trail off as I get through the learning-to-use-the-camera phase. I spend a lot of spare time scanning my old negatives (to build an invincible digital archive!!) and half the fun is turning up pictures that I'd taken but never printed and thus completely forgotten about. At the time they were minor irrelevant pictures, but now for reasons unavailable at the time they are classic, ie, "Oh, wow, I never actually took any other pictures of her old bedroom" or whatever.

don't delete off the card -- it can corrupt whatever comes behind it. Just do your edit afterwards and delete off yr HD

so, what, i'm supposed to buy a new card when i fill it up?

No, you download to your computer and then re-format the card.

don't delete off the card -- it can corrupt whatever comes behind it. Just do your edit afterwards and delete off yr HD

Wow. Really? Are they working on this?

feeling this thread again after calling the two main dedicated film places in my neighborhood and finding neither one actually honors (or has heard of) the prices given on their website. Price for develop + CD (no prints) feels like it's completely skyrocketed in the last few years, and nobody knows what they're talking about. One place tried to convince me that an image scanned for 300dpi printing at 4x6 will, somehow, be exactly the same if printed 8x12. What?

Just trying to figure the best way of clearing a backlog of film from before I went well and fully digital in 2011. Are there any reliable mail order services?

I Second That Emulsion (a film thread)

hahaha i just thought of that and posted there, i beg forgiveness for reviving this terrible thread instead