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[OM] c41 processing

Subject: [OM] c41 processing
From: Joe Gwinn <joegwinn@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 31 Oct 2002 09:10:10 -0500
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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