Reader's Comments - Index of - Free

Recommended Labs
Seattle FilmWorks has a bad history, from which they have been trying to escape with a name change to
"PhotoWorks". Their original sin was pushing respooled movie film onto consumers. Movie film is
lower quality than photographic film and it is also non-archival. Family memories on movie film fade
very quickly unless processed negatives are stored in the kinds of freezers used by movie studios. With
the advent of the consumer Internet age, Seattle PhotoWorks went in for spamming.
Duggal is a big lab in Manhattan with a reasonably clean E6 line. However, they ruined some of my best
C41 with their dirty neg developing and enlarged contact production areas. At $40/roll, one would
expect better. I had a bunch of PhotoCD scans done there and they were also remarkably dusty. Double
the price of Boston Photo and then you get to spend a few weeks in PhotoShop repairing the dust and
neg damage.
For my notes on Boston's Colortek, see below.
In the Boston area
Boston Photo Imaging on Newbury Street is good choice for a full service lab, with comprehensive
traditional and digital facilities.
ZONA, 561 Windsor Street, Somerville, MA 02143, (617) 628-2545 is our best-known local Ilfochrome
printer. They also have a dip-and-dunk black and white line.
Colortek is known to many local pros as "Colorwreck". I once gave them ten rolls of 120 film. They lost
one. They returned two rolls of B&W so underdeveloped that even the frame numbers were barely
visible. When I complained, they said "it is obviously an exposure problem". I pointed out that my E6 of
the same subject was perfectly exposed. They were unconvinced. I asked them how likely they thought
it was that Ilford (with the frame numbers) and I both had exposure problems on the same rolls. They
were unconvinced.
The rest of the world
Use the full text search engine or browse by categories in the photo.net Neighbor to Neighbor service,
which contains recommendations from all over the Internet of various labs.
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Reader's Comments
Took some family photos at Christmas and went with WalMart's special on prints and Photo CD. The
digital images were scanned at approximately 1800x1200--less than a 3MP camera--and cost $8.80 for
24 exposure roll. I didn't find this a particularly useful service.
http://www.photo.net/photo/labs (9 of 10)7/3/2005 2:24:23 AM