Processing Film, Take 2

So I finally finished another roll of film, and this time took it to Japan Camera to get it developed. The 1-day service for processing and printing is $7.99. If you include scanning the pictures to JPEGs on CD it comes to $15 plus tax. It still feels steep.

So when I got the pictures, the prints looked pretty good. But when I checked out the pictures on the CD, something wasn't right. They weren't my pictures! They were somebody's Caribbean vacation pictures. Most of the pictures were taken on some sort of tubing trip down a river. You'd think this wouldn't be disturbing except for the fat bare legs taking up the bottom third of every picture. So I called the store and they said I could come back and swap the CD. Three trips to the mall in 2 days is a bit much.

So I finally got my pictures on CD. They are pretty good. 3090 by 2048 makes good sized 6.3 megapixel images. And there are no flaws: no dirt, no scratches, no dust, no hair. Even better than the negative scans I made at home. Here's a sample:

 

So I'm very satisfied with the quality. Not so satisfied with the price. Oh well. The alternative is unacceptable so I'll have to live with it. Maybe I'll talk to them about their competitor's price and I'll see what they say.

Since they are film scans you can see some film grain. It was a 400-speed film. (To be more specific, it is Fujicolor Superia X-TRA 400. My last film was a Kodak Ultra Max 400.) I'm okay with the grain since the picture quality is very good. I had to colour-correct some images. And some others that had bad exposure were lightened in development. That's a bit annoying since I don't think it improved the image.

Processing and Scanning Colour Negative Film

Since Ken Rockwell can get good results developing and scanning his film at a mini-lab, I thought I could too. First I looked at the prices for developing film at the place where I get my digital prints, Japan Camera. Developing and printing a roll of 24 exposures costs $6.99. That does not include a scan of the negatives on CD. To get that with your prints you pay $16.99. Ten dollars seemed a bit steep for a bit of computer work.

My next options were the grocery store and the drug store. Zehrs' Photolab and Shopper's Drug Mart's Easypix had the same price for developing, printing and scanning 24 exposures, $6.99. That seemed like a much more reasonable price. I had a bad experience at Zehrs before when printing digital so I decided to try Easypix. I don't know if there would really be that much difference since when you visit their websites you can see they are both "Powered By PhotoChannel In Partnership with Fujifilm."

I stopped by Shopper's on my lunch break to drop off the film. I thought I'd have to get 5-day service since I didn't expect them to have the equipment to develop film on-site. But to my surprise they said they could have them ready in a few hours, so I picked them up at the end of my work day.

I quickly looked through the prints at the store and wasn't too impressed. I saw the same issues I saw when I used to get my digital prints from Bent's Camera. The darks were too dark and there wasn't much detail in the smooth gradient of my 3-year-old boy's face. I also saw a purple line across the middle of about half the prints. I hoped these problems didn't appear in the scans on CD.

When I put the CD in my computer I had another disappointment. The same problems as on the prints appeared (harsh contrast, purple streaks), plus more. The scans are 1544x1024, which is only 1.5 megapixels. The images have noise like you see in a compact camera. And worst of all, there was dust, hair and other fuzzles on the prints. That was totally unacceptable. I don't know how they get away creating such crappy scans. My last hope was that they didn't mess up the negatives too.

To see what the negatives were like, I had to borrow my Dad's scanner, an Epson Perfection 4490 Photo. Scanning the negatives I got images that had almost none of the problems of the scans from the lab. I did see some of the purple streaks on some images but it was much reduced. There was no dust, the contrast was much smoother and the colours were better (once I enabled colour correction in the scanning software). And I could get much higher resolution images. I decided to keep them to 8 megapixels.

Here are some samples for the same exposure, which happens to be my favourite from this roll. You'll have to click through to the full size to see all the problems with these images. First we'll look at the scan of the print I made at home:


Here you can see all the problems that I mentioned about the prints. There is some dirt in the lower half (in the tree), but that was on the scanner's glass, which I later cleaned. But here you can see something else: the hair that you see on the scan from the lab is in the print too! Look just behind the top of the boy's head.

Now lets look at the scan that the lab gave me:


Oh the humanity!

Let's see what I got when I scanned the negative myself:


Much better, but there's still a green streak across the top. I guess that's on the negative. You can see detail in the dark cabinet and in the dark parts of the tree.

One more. Here's what it looks like after some correction in iPhoto:


Very nice.

I don't want to scan all my negatives myself, so for my next roll of film I'll see what that $16.99 gets me from Japan Camera.

Using a Nikon F75

Alright, so what's it like to use the Nikon F75? It is very similar to the D50 and so seems very familiar to me. I was surprised at how much smaller it was than the D50. And since the 50 mm is the only lens I have for it, the camera+lens combo is much smaller than my D50 with the 18-70 DX lens on. Of course the lack of a screen on the back feels weird. I still find myself looking at the back after I take a picture to review the image, and have nothing to see.

When I got it off eBay, it came with no accessories, except for a body cap on the lens mount, thank goodness for that. Apparently when new it comes with an accessory shoe cover to cover the flash shoe, and an eyepiece cap. The eyepiece cap is to cover the eyepiece to keep light coming in there from affecting the exposure when you aren't looking through the camera when taking a picture. This comes in handy when using the self-timer. The lack of these pieces doesn't bother me. The flash shoe cover from my D50 came off as soon as I got it and has been in a drawer ever since. It also had no manual. I found a PDF of the manual online, though.

The exposure dial on the top left is almost exactly the same as the one on the D50. This is the dial where you choose AUTO, P, S, A, M, and scene modes. The only difference is that the F75 does not have a Child scene mode. The LCD panel on the top right is also very similar to the one on the D50. One difference that always stands out for me is that the number of exposures remaining is only 2 digits instead of 3. Obviously this doesn't often need to go higher than 36 on the F75 for 36-exposure film, and oftentimes it won't be higher than 24. The D50 needs a supplementary 'K' indicator for when there is room for more than 1000 pictures on your memory card with the current image size settings. I see that a lot since I switched to Normal JPEG from Fine JPEG and from a 1 GB SD card to a 2 GB one.

Niceties that the F75 has that the D50 lacks are that the aforementioned LCD panel has a backlight, triggered by a dedicated button between it and the shutter release button. The other one is a depth-of-field preview button. I haven't used that much yet, I'm not used to having it available.

It also didn't ship with batteries. It requires 2 CR-2 3V batteries, which aren't quite as common as your standard AA's. I had to wait until the next day to go out and pick up some. Trying to play around with it without batteries, I mounted the 50 mm lens and had a look-see. I was disconcerted to find that it wouldn't go in perfect focus. I switched the focus setting to Manual and turned the focus ring on the lens. I got it to get better and worse, but never perfect. Then I tried adjusting the dioptre adjustment lever on the eyepiece. Again no luck. I was worried that there was a optional viewfinder eyepiece on it for more extreme prescriptions. By the way I don't get the point of the dioptre adjustment and optional eyepieces for people with glasses. I always look through the eyepiece with my glasses on, requiring no adjustment on the camera. Anyway once I got batteries in the camera focus worked just fine.

Next thing to do is to load film. Even though I used to use a compact 35 mm camera, I'm still nervous when loading film. I always feel I only have one chance to get it right. Put in the film canister. Double check canister is seated correctly. Slowly put out the film leader, but not too much! Place the leader on the take-up reel. Trust that it will take-up properly since it's supposed to do that automatically. Triple check the canister is seated and not turned. Make sure the film is flat. Slowly and gently, yet firmly close back. Wait for reassuring whirring noises. Watch exposure counter. Hear shutter release. Everything's OK! Saying that, it's still deliciously analogue.

Yet another oddity of the F75 is that is pulls out all the unexposed film and, as you take pictures, winds the film back into the canister. This is good because the pictures you have already taken are protected in the canister if you accidentally open the back without winding your film. Your last exposure or two will not yet be in the canister however, and will still be ruined. A downside is that it doesn't squeeze those extra 2 or 3 pictures on the film that you usually get with other cameras. It dutifully wound to exactly 24 exposures. This method results in the exposure counter counting down instead of up, but that's more intuitive to me. One more side effect is that when you get your negatives back the pictures are in the reverse order.

Taking pictures is as you expect. The mirror flip sound, followed by the shutter release sound, but then the additional film wind sound. Then look on the back. D'oh! No screen! Somehow the mirror flip doesn't sound as tight as on the D50, a little floppy and a little slow.

Next post I'll talk more about actually taking pictures.