Bill,
At 2:28 PM +0000 10/29/02, olympus-digest wrote:
>Date: Mon, 28 Oct 2002 15:44:11 -0600
>From: "Bill Pearce" <bspearce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
>Subject: [OM] c41 processing
>
>"Konica is screwing the developing up, yielding negatives that cannot be
>printed correctly."
>
>Joe,
>
>The probablity of that is infintessimally small. Kodak and others have spent
>vast sums on C41, making it the most bulletproof process known to man. Some
>minilabs may run their chemistry past exhaustion, but that is very out of
>the ordinary.
This was my theory as well, for exactly the reasons you give.
What changed my mind was seeing that the new lab got only somewhat better
prints of the Konica-developed negatives, and that when the new lab was given
the whole processing task, the results were far better than ever seen with
Konica. This has held up for five or six rolls so far.
I had been tearing my hair out for more than a year trying to find the source
of the consistent "overexposure" (never underexposure). I got my first 35mm
camera in 1963, and have been using the OM-1 since 1975, and after about 1965
always got exposure of typical outdoor scenes spot-on, for thousands of frames,
all of which were processed by a succession of commercial processors, largely
Kodak back then. Back then, if the exposure was wrong, it was generally my
fault, and it took a big mistake given the wide lattitude of color negative
film. Particularly odd was when when pictures of green gardens in sunlight
came out "overexposed" despite careful attention to exposure -- this is exactly
the kind of scene for which the camera lightmeter is designed.
The other pieces of evidence are that Ektachrome 200 slides came out spot on,
and that all the negatives on the roll have the same density, implying that the
camera lightmeter and exposure control systems all work properly.
>On the other hand, it is so easy to screw up color balance in printing it is
>staggering. I am continually amazed at the generally acceptable results from
>minilabs. Also, there are some film/paper combinations that will yield
>different results.
And that's why I avoided minilabs, although there have been reports of good
results from specific minilabs, often in unlikely places. It all seems to
depend on the happenstance of who is running the minilab. I may have lucked
out with the local CVS minilab.
>Disclaimer: never used a Konica lab.
I don't know if this problem is true of all Konica labs, but the one that
serves the Boston area seems to be a problem. I won't be back anytime soon.
Joe Gwinn
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