Are Photo labs much worse today than they were before digital?

Andrew K said:

The other point I'd bring up is the hang up people have that "real chemical" prints are the only "honest" way to print films. It's amazing how many people I've spoken to tell me they shoot film because they take their film to a lab who has a "chemical" machine and makes "real" prints.

However for at least the last 10 years I don't know of any lab in Australia that prints optically - they all use machines like Fuji Frontier's or Noritsu's which scan the negatives and then print them with LED's or lasers...

So if a film is not printed optically is the print (chemical or otherwise) a real interpretation of the negative?

One for another day and another beer.....

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For me, simple long term familiarity and proven lifetime of photo-chemical prints has a preference over the unknowns of inkjet permanance, notwithstanding the 'accelerated fade' testing that one reads about. We have no control over selection of inkjet paper or ink, when we get prints from commercial inkjet print houses. So permanence tests are likely to not apply for any given location, unless you know with certainty what paper and what ink are used and if they both match published permanence testing.
But even more importantly (for me) is the appearance of prints on Fuji Crystal Archive paper vs. any inkjet surface I have seen. Lastly, any inkjet is ink applied to the surface on top of coated paper, whereas color dyes embedded in the emulsion simply are more appealing to my eye.

wiltw said:

Hopefully educate all of us about what happens when film and print volume drops signficantly...Does it get easier or more difficult to maintain calibration in view of low volumes, does it not matter? That way we all get a better insight into the quality trending as processing volumes continue to decline...set expectations!

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Definitely it gets more difficult when volume falls below a certain zone, at least for color neg systems which is where I'm most knowledgeable. The thing to understand is that the processing tank is always supposed to maintain the chemical concentrations that the process is designed for. There is a certain balance reached as a combination of development, replenishment, and evaporation/oxidation.

When you have really low process volumes, then evaporation and the oxidation of preservatives becomes significant, and the byproducts are not being flushed out as much. So the chemical balance shifts away from aim, and the control plots can go out of spec. There ARE special replenishers for "low utilization" processors, but they only go so far.

So the ideal situation is to process enough film that evaporation/oxidation are relatively insignificant. Once your volume is past this critical zone, additional processing volume doesn't matter much.

Much appreciation for a bit more insight, Mr Bill.

Are Photo labs much worse today than they were before digital?
Much worse? I cannot say. As I posted before I prefer to have optical printing with chemical processing. What I have noticed is that with optical printing I can get great custom work done. With digital printing I have to do the scanning and digital work and then I turn it to an employee who loads the files to be printed. I have not had any custom digital printing done, so that is an area that I do not have any experience.

Sirius Glass said:

Are Photo labs much worse today than they were before digital?
Much worse? I cannot say. As I posted before I prefer to have optical printing with chemical processing. What I have noticed is that with optical printing I can get great custom work done. With digital printing I have to do the scanning and digital work and then I turn it to an employee who loads the files to be printed. I have not had any custom digital printing done, so that is an area that I do not have any experience.

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At my lab you can have ZERO employee interference with your digital files or you can have me work your files from Raw image to final print. Back in the day there was only the second option as digital technoloy
has allowed PS desktop warriors to control 100% the look of their prints.

I forgot to add, does a wider lens focal length also have an impact on image quality? I am under the impression that images shot by a 50mm seem to have more "density" (lack of a better word), compared to shots by 28mm, where the details appear to be sprawled out all over the image. Is this possible?

Odot said:

I forgot to add, does a wider lens focal length also have an impact on image quality? I am under the impression that images shot by a 50mm seem to have more "density" (lack of a better word), compared to shots by 28mm, where the details appear to be sprawled out all over the image. Is this possible?

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That seems more like an issue of general composition rather than directly related to focal length. - You can focus on something with more texture/fine detail or on a very 'empty' scene, and you can do it with an extreme ultra wide or a super telephoto.

Odot said:

I forgot to add, does a wider lens focal length also have an impact on image quality? I am under the impression that images shot by a 50mm seem to have more "density" (lack of a better word), compared to shots by 28mm, where the details appear to be sprawled out all over the image. Is this possible?

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Recently wide angle lenses in the hands of the digitial newbies and inept photographers has gotten a bad rap from all the highly distorted images shoved in our faces on the internet, in ads and on television. Lack of "density" is not the problem. Distortion and poor composition is more the issue.

There has definitely been a trend towards wide angle photography, a couple of the what you could call tourist landscape pros down here always seem to shot somewhere between 17mm and 24mm i.e. they make some of their living selling big prints to tourists. I guess large empty or near empty areas in a picture (or just sky or sea) are not that bad a thing if the final print is really big.

Sirius Glass said:

Recently wide angle lenses in the hands of the digitial newbies and inept photographers has gotten a bad rap from all the highly distorted images shoved in our faces on the internet, in ads and on television. Lack of "density" is not the problem. Distortion and poor composition is more the issue.

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well, using the 28mm on a FX body compared to using it on a F100 cannot even be compared because the difference in overall quality is too big. even distortion comes off much better shooting digi.

My Answer to this one is Yes They did get worse !!!....and some things got sort of better.

Way backin 2002 I did a 2 year stint as a Minilab Service Engineer for the Australian Fuji Distribiter "HANIMEX" I learnt alot about Film proccessing and what can go wrong I also istaled a number of the "New" Fuji Frontiers. One of the pro labs bought one and was having a issue with the quality of Medium format enlargments, when they printed the biggest size 10x14 from a 120 400 asa neg the the print was full of grain, and looked like crap !!!! Not a happy customer !!! after alot of thick manual reading and a number of experiments, I found out the following.

1. I compared a enlarger print to a Frontier print to a hand print done on a Enlarger by hand taken on Ektar 25 120 film.....on the hand print there was a lot more detail.

2.I did the same with Kodak 400 120 film.....Frontier Full of grain, Enlarger almost none !!!

After reading a paragraph in a back corner of the manual, I found out that a Frontier only prints at 300dpi and Scans 120 film at the same Resolution as 35mm...and generates a file the same size......Hmm

Make sure if you have a Digital 120 print done it is scanned on someting else !!!! and remember a Frontier can only print at 300dpi Max

The Good....Because the newer digital minilabs are capable of self corecting ect the quality of small 4x5 prints improved and the cost of producing them went down. Less control srips were needed, the Chem was mixed by the machine so that did'nt get screwed up as well :-less of a problem for poorly trained staff ect..they just had to add water to a tank.

Here in sunny Adelaide we only have 5 or so labs left who can process film none can do a enlarger print ......but you can get 4x5 prints done from a digital file for next to nothing !!!

Johnkpap

The scanning is still a big problem, the lab I use sometimes got themselves the latest Noritsu scanner as they are so busy they need the throughput. It gives higher resolution for 35mm, somewhere around 30 MP ISTR but on 6x6 only about 20 MP and its not even a great 20 MP at that. Honestly I really struggle to understand this fascination with Jose Villa style Frontier or Noritsu lab scans from these machines, sure the colour might be nice but they make medium format look really bad. I got sharper more detailed looking scans from 35mm just more grainy, put a neg in the enlarger though and it is mind blowing how much more you have to play with over 35mm.

I have used Fuji Fromtier scanners for many years (35mm & APS only) and found them to be very good. I have scanned a Fuji Superia 35mm negative and printed an A1 (20x30 inch approx) Epson wide format print (inkjet) and it looked good.

I have found with Frontiers and Pakon scanners that it's the attention to detail that will produce good results. For example, don't scan on full auto, add sharpening etc, and most importantly use your experience when viewing the image on screen to make any adjustments. Like any piece of software or equipment, it will only do what it is instructed to do. Know its limitations and your own.

It must be remembered that software for most of these scanners is old and often running on an old windows setup. Until last year my two Frontiers were running on windows 2000 and the Pakon runs on XP.

I think that the regular, high street type shops that still offer C41 process, print and scan are...in general..getting worse. The amount of film they are receiving has gone down drastically in most cases. I found that in the late 90s, when digital printing began to become the norm, there was a worsening in the fine detail on the images but overall they still looked good in terms of colour and overall contrast. In any case, the negs could be retained for more careful selective prints later (ie send a handful to a pro lab).

Now, I find that some major chains who still offer C41 can't even process C41 films properly. My last rolls have specks on them, though otherwise the negs have the correct density. But the scans and prints are way off in terms of contrast. Deep blue skies have been rendered white! Yet if I use my very cheap home scanner, while I get less fine detail, I can get pleasing colours and contrast including those glorious blue skies that I photographed. That's possibly down to sloppy work and to the issues Bill describes above.

there really aren't many dedicated mini lab workers out there anymore who make it a point to know their machine, know
the best way to work on a film negative or file like there used to be.
i'm not familiar with the names of the different mini lab machines
but from what i remember they do a color meter check and the operator has to know whether to boost, or reduce exposure or adjust filtration.
and since these days most mini labs are a retail clerk at a drug store, they don't get trained and just let the machine do its thing.
and maybe one of the reasons lab prints might look worse is that they are self service kiosks
with limited control for the person making the prints, or they leave everything to the camera
or "auto fix" and the lab that prints the images for them or the in-store dye sub printer just prints WISWYG
and they weren't very good files that were imported to begin with so the whole result is bad file=bad print.
i've sent film to fuji labs or back in the day kodak send out (northeast?) and some of what came back was terrible,
and some was not so bad .. that was IDK 15-20 years ago.