AG Photographic

Hi Matthew.

Thank you for your offer. It would be good to see scans before RM get the negs. It would then show whether it could be in fact RM potentially damaging them. I emailed last year about negatives arriving in damaged sleeves so RM also need to be potentially excluded. I did notice the Ilford envelope did arrive without any visible marks on the outside.

I'm going to go through all negs and recheck them with a different scanner too.
 
For what it's worth, I've used AG a number of times for developing slide film and I've never had a problem with them. I also particularly like the freepost envelopes that they offer.
 
Hi Matthew,

Thanks for the post. It does go some way in building up trust that you would come and post here.

I do have some points to contend with though that you have either forgotten or deliberately left out:

"You know we had the wrong address because you moved house and we still had your old address."
- Yes, we spoke on the phone about this a few times. The main issue is that I informed you on three separate occasions (twice by email and once in a letter that was attached with the negatives I sent you) that you should send to the new address, providing it to you each time. You still sent them to the wrong address though, which is very poor practice.

"Your forwarding did not work."
- We have tested this several times by sending ourselves letters. We have had forwarded mail from many, many other places. By our records, the ONLY thing to have not been forwarded to me are my negatives, which is where my suspicions come from.

"We have no interest in trying to cover up a mistake."
- I would like to believe this. But in trying to find out what happened to my negatives, two or three e-mail queries went completely ignored and unresponded. A voicemail left on your answer machine went ignored and unresponded. I could only get any kind of answer if I was lucky enough to get through to a person via the phone. When I did get to through to people on the phone I was only ever met with "well what do you want us to do?" with no real concern.

The last time I was speaking with you on the phone it had been over 3 months since my negatives had gone missing, you hadn't checked with the post office/sorting office at your end if they might be sat there or not. As I was asking if you could go and check, we were disconnected (not sure if I was hung up on or the connection dropped). Given the fact that I was wasting my time every 2-4 weeks trying to get somewhere with this and getting nowhere, I decided it would be better to save the money on phone bills and stressing myself and just give up on ever seeing them again.

Like I said before, I'm pleased other people are getting a good service. Other than the scratching, I was pleased with the development and scans that I received. In terms of quality and cost of service, I would recommend you. However, on the customer care side and trust aspect I couldn't possibly recommend you because a very basic and simple instruction couldn't be followed.

Thanks again for the post, would be great to see you guys on here a little more often.
 
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Hi Glenn

All I can say is, we returned your negs back to the address in question, and we have absolutely no reason not to have done this. We are handling a lot of orders and there was confusion our end about the address. And when you said you hadn't received them we simply didn't have an answer at our end - we are at the mercy of the postal service, most of the time they are very good, but there are risks. As I said, my policy is to hold our hands up if there is a problem. But the policy stops short of just agreeing to having scratched a film, when we haven't! If films go missing in the post, there is very little we can do and, because we can not know the value of films (other than the material value) the onus has to be on the customer to cover the risk. This has always been the case in photographic processing, and every lab has and has always traded on the same terms in this respect.

The one saving grace is of course that you have the original high resolution scans, so all is not lost.

Since 1st October 2012, we have handled over 15,000 orders for lab services, with a huge number to returning customers, many of whome are very experienced professionals and serious enthusiasts. Scratching, fogging, or whatever, someones film and then trying to cover it up is simply the kiss of death to a business like this - like a restaurant poisoning someone. And I have no interest in going down that road, it simply achieves nothing.
 
Thought I might just take the opportunity to let you all know here in advance - end of next week the installation starts on the 52" Autopan paper processor we have bought. This is to work in tandem with our Oce Lightjet printer. For anyone who isn't familiar with the Lightjet, they were made in Canada in pretty small numbers and offer the ultimate in digital silver halide printing - real photographic paper, up to 50" in width, is exposed by red green and blue lasers and because of the design of the machine, the print quality is truly outstanding. And very fast - the Lightjet is capable of exposing a 50 x 140" print in 3 minutes.

The Lightjet is also capable of handling Ilfords Galerie Digital Silver range, thereby offering the possibility of digital silver gelatin prints...!

The only printers that compete properly with the Lightjet in terms of quality output, are possibly the Durst Lambda or the Polyelettronica Laser lab - but the Durst is the size of a bungalow and the Poly is absurdly expensive to run. But I believe corner to corner sharpness are superior with the Lightjet.

This set up will enable us to offer a really competitive alternative for large format silver prints to the London labs who currently dominate this market (and do a very good job, I would add - but their overheads are quite a lot higher than ours....)

As soon as it's all up and running, I'm going to come up with some VERY special deals to get the volume going through it and build the market for us - so if you are thinking of getting any prints made larger than 12" width....hang on!
 
Matthew Wells said:
Hi Glenn
If films go missing in the post, there is very little we can do and, because we can not know the value of films (other than the material value) the onus has to be on the customer to cover the risk.
Click to expand...

So you send them to the wrong address, they go missing, and it's my responsibility? That's extremely disappointing and simply illogical. There's been no effort to atone for the error and this attitude is exactly why I won't be a returning customer.

I have to say I'm very disappointed with the way it has been handled, just as much as I have been them being sent to the wrong address. It's also pretty disappointing that you have failed to discuss why queries went completely unresponded to, just another thing you've glossed over.
 
I have found a confounding variable. Agfa vista film. The agfa single use camera I had developed the other day has identical scratching marks to the vista roll that I sent to AG. The single use camera has them through the entire roll - 4 distinct lines at identical width apart. The vista frames with scratches processed by AG have identical marks but not as pronounced. They're all the same looking width dividing the frame in quarters. I haven't sent anyone else Vista apart from AG.

Anyone else notice visible emulsion scratches with Vista?

The other rolls that had noticeable scratches and marks one of them could have been damaged by RM as the return envelopes used by AG arrived creased and visibly crushed in places. There were pin holes in the film sleeves of the Llandudno roll I got back. The next roll I took to a one hour place not long after was completely scratch free so I don't think the camera is the cause.

Last 3 rolls with AG 2 have had visible scratch marks but one I think is down to RM/not robust enough packaging the other might be attributable to Vista?
 
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Just thought I would bump this thread and say that I sent a roll of 120 and a roll of 35mm to AG on Monday for processing and medium res scans and they arrived today! Last week I did the same and they arrived on Friday.

While I have had delays in the past, all seems good and I can't fault to be honest.
 
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