I think that Mike is exactly right. We live in an apartment and do not have
any darkroom capability. My wife is a photography student at a college in
Houston but it is way too far to go just to develop a few rolls of film, so
we do our negs at home. Once you finalize on your film and developer
combinations it becomes quite simple even though we can only load the
cannisters at night...a changing bag is in the budget. I use Ilford almost
exclusively, Ilfosol S because it is a liquid, single shot, and works great
with my choices of Ilford B/W films. After developing, cutting, and storing
the negs I look at them on a light box using an 8X loupe. From this I
decide which negs to have printed at the pro lab. Yesterday I sent a 120
B/W neg to the lab to have printed on the Fuji Frontier system (10x10 @
$8.50) that does so nicely on my color transparencies. The counter person
advised that I may not like the results because it would be printed on color
paper, but since it was just a test I would go ahead and try it. I am also
having another, similar B/W neg, custom printed (10x10 @ $14.00 USD). I
will be interested in how the two compare.
Jerry in Houston
-----Original Message-----
From: Mike Johnston [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Wednesday, February 07, 2001 11:52 PM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Average cost of B+W film development and contact sheet
Mark Sheftick wrote:
> I have a quick question. I had some T-Max 400 (24 exp) developed and got a
> contact sheet made but no prints. It was US$ 11.00 before any taxes. I was
> wondering if this is a normal cost for something like this. I guess,
> compared to the $8.00 most places charge for C-41 and one or two sets of
> prints, I was a little disappointed at what I got for my money.
>
> This of course is not to mention the fact that I had to go in 3 times to
get
> it because the first two times someone apparently just forgot to develop
my
> film.
>
> Please let me know if I should look around based on cost. I may be looking
> around based on service regardless.
Mark,
That's about par for the course. You may find this service for as low as $9,
but seldom much lower, at least in the areas of the US I'm familiar with.
The problem is that very few labs have automated lines for B&W. It has to be
done by hand, and there's no money in it for the labs. No steady business,
either.
You can do it better and much more cheaply yourself. I once calculated
everything out very exactly, and figured that it cost me $2.11 per roll and
21 minutes of my time per roll for developing and proofing six rolls, doing
2 tanks of 3 rolls each. It's a little over 2 hours total for developing the
film, cutting the film after it dries, and making the proofs. That's been a
few years, and your methods wouldn't exactly duplicate mine, but you can see
that $12.66 is quite a bit cheaper than $66, presuming you can spare the two
hours. I just used to do the work while watching sports on TV on the
weekends. It's "wasted" time anyway.
--Mike
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