C.H.Ling wrote:
Your words about "scanning film is still not mature" triggered me to think
about the film printing process, the digital age is already started and
traditional film printing's day is counting but the film printing process is
still very disappointing, as least many of us has poor experience in
printing labs. Although they are one hour labs but the equipment has been
developed for many years and they are professional equipment, why the
results are still not satisfying? Is the basic reason the nature of
negative? is it inherent hard to print?
The photo processing business as a whole is a high volume, low margin,
economically mature industry. The vast majority of the customers are
satisfied with the average product and the major determinants of choice
of processor are price and convienience. You are simply not their target
customer. I know lots of people who are highly satisfied with random
cropping, oversaturated and often unrealistic color, excessive contrast
with white detailless skys, etc. etc. from cheap P&S and disposable
cameras.
There is a Kodak TV commercial here where 2 young women go on a tour of
Rome with a fast driver. One uses a regular disposable and the other a
Kodak Max disposable. One gets pictures where everything is an
unrecognizable blur and the other gets pictures where nothing appears to
be moving and all the sights are recognizable. Those are the criteria of
the majority of the market. They aren't wrong, they simply want a
different thing than you and I do. However, they are the vast majority
of the market volume, so the vast majority of the market providers cater
to their needs. I usually get my procesing from a photo shop as Kodak
Royal or Fuji Premium Plus. As a test, I recently tried a roll sent
through a drug store for Kodak Picture processing. I was amazed! Those
prints were so bright, saturated and contrasty, had so much 'POP', they
practically jumped off the paper and assaulted my eyeballs directly. Not
particularly like the things (mostly flowers) I took pictures of, but
fabulous eye candy. Oh yes, about half the price of the premium
processing. I'm thinking about trying a roll of Portra NC with this
processing. Will the opposites create something nice....or a monster??
I think negative is inherently hard to print in the simple sense that
the film carries considerably more range of brightness than the paper
can reproduce. This creates an inherently insoluble problem for
automated printing equipment which can't maintain both shadow and
highlight detail and doesn't know which is important in each image and
can't decrease contrast too much without losing the 'pop' that most
consumers like, realistic or not.
Moose
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