On Dec 16, 2006, at 3:06 PM, Mark Cassino wrote: >> The move away from film is driving a lot of photofinishers out of >> business, >> unfortunately. > > Yeah - the lab here has cut its hours twice in the last couple of > years. ...
I tried to buy some Ilford 120 XP2 Super for the Pentax 645 at a local camera shop when I was in NY. They wanted over $7 per roll, no discount for a ten pack. "We don't sell much of this stuff any more." At that price, it's no wonder. (B&H sold me a ten pack for $28, including sales tax.) The folks at Keeble & Shuchat here in Palo Alto, CA processed a roll of 120 T400CN for me in an hour. Service was great, price was again nearly $7. So what about quality? My Epson 2450 is no match for a Nikon 9000 or drum scanner (or even a V700), but to get the higher quality scans would be about $80-100 for a high rez scan, per frame, from a lab or a substantial investment in a better scanner. The 2450 pulls in a passable 21Mpixel scan from 645 format negatives, and those print nicely to an A3 Super size. Is the quality any better than what I was getting from *ist DS or what I'm now getting from K10D digital captures? No. It's different, yes. Film is noisier and yet pleasing. The coupling of field of view and depth of field is different, and that's a difference that can be exploited to good effect. I like it, although I look at the time it takes me to select, clean, scan, and finish a print and acknowledge that that again adds to the cost. The trouble is that Tom's "common folks" are much more sensitive to how much it costs than to anything else. And in that department, digital capture to a print is a major savings now. Nearly any inexpensive digital camera can make a 4x6 print better than most photofinishers at this point. The result is that the game is over for mass market film photofinishers. There's still a lot of business to be done there, there are still a lot of film cameras in use and one-shots are still selling, but the future is gone. (And while I see absolutely no point in shooting 35mm or APS film at all anymore, other than for sentimentality, I'm enjoying the heck out of this Pentax 645. Dammit, now I'm looking forward to its digital sibling.) Godfrey -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net
