UK process & scan labs - for the non-wealthy

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peripatetic

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So I love the films we have today. Kodak in particular have blown me away with Ektar and the new Portra.

I would also love to do MF with these films, but I love digital prints (heretical round here I know, but I prefer good inkjet prints to silver) and what I would like is to find somewhere that will process and do high res scans at a modest cost.

Is it just too manually intensive for anyone to do these at a reasonable cost? Are the new Fuji labs really that much slower when they are producing high-res scans?

£20+ per roll of 120 or 35mm for process and high-res scans is just so insanely expensive I am just shooting everything on my 5D2 lately.

Am I just out of luck?
 
You get what you pay for. My guess is you want the best quality scans for next to nothing. We would all like that, but in the real world it doesn't happen.
 
I use Genie, and C41 120 dev/scan is £5.99 last time I looked. I like the results, I've had a couple of slightly damaged negs back off them once, but they're quick and reliable.

If you invest in a scanner for MF, Genie will process for £1.99 or something like that, hard to beat that price, even developing yourself.
 
Thanks for the referrals.

Genie looks interesting. £6 for process and medium res scans is by far the best UK price I have seen.

I suppose if using mail-order the US is not really further away than other UK towns, so I will certainly give Precision a try. A $12 dev & 28Mp scan looks very nice.

@john, thanks for the links Metrocolourlabs look very interesting.

@tlitody - Surely it's very much in the interests of Fuji and Kodak to make it easy and cost-effective for the labs to provide high-res scans direct from the mini-labs? The only reason for labs to still charge £30 per roll for 20Mp scans is that the process involves a significant amount of manual labour. Either that or they somehow missed the last 5 years of progress in the DSLR market.

We're now getting <£10k MFDB, if film is going to have a future even for pure amateur hobbyists we have to have a proposition which is a bit more cost-effective.

Sure I will pay £50 for a drum-scan for a special image, but a lot of people are home-printing to A3+, so we really do need 20Mp scans at reasonable prices and with minimal hassle.
 
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Your 5D2 will produce a far superior quality file of 5616x3744 pixels than any minilab scan to 3000 x 2000. So it comes down to the image quality you expect. And a minilab scan to 5616x3744 won't be as high quality as your 5D2 file and it slows down minilab throughput both scanning and writing to CD.
Scanning degrades quality and there is no getting away from that. Whether its good enough is another matter.
 
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Quality and size are not the same thing.

Many thousands of people feel that no digital camera can yet match the 'quality' of film.
 
thank you, i might steal some of these london based tips.

although I think i need to now get over my fear about developing stuff myself.
 
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