Beginner Where can I cheaply develop film?

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Hi!

I'm aware this question has probably been asked an absolute TON of times but I just wanted a direct answer instead of having to read through loads of threads and not actually finding what I need so, here I am.

I was given a film camera with no knowledge of how to use it etc. (I've got the hang of it now though) but I'm still unsure how to go about getting the film developed. Whilst at uni my housemate (on a photography course) would develop and scan them for me completely free of charge but now I am back in my home town and can no longer access those facilities. I know Boots can do colour film but it's £6 every time and I'm not sure where I can go for black and white film. I'm aware you can buy your own kit cheaply but I don't have enough space/experience with that so would rather steer away from that option.

I prefer for the photos to be digital scans as opposed to physical prints so does anyone know where I could go for this? Also, can I trust ebay? Does anyone know of a service on ebay they have used and have had decent results?

Thank you!!

Amy
 
Are you shooting B&W of C41? If you're shooting C41 (colour negative) and have a large Asda nearby then you might get lucky with them. They're only a few quid a roll for dev+scan and aren't too bad at all for the price. Although they're obviously not a pro level lab. For B&W you really would benefit from doing it yourself, you need no previous experience to learn, and all the stuff to do it will fit in a small tub. It takes an hour or so in an evening and you can have the lights on the whole time by using a light proof development tank and a small lightproof changing bag.
 
Hi!

I'm aware this question has probably been asked an absolute TON of times but I just wanted a direct answer instead of having to read through loads of threads and not actually finding what I need so, here I am.

I was given a film camera with no knowledge of how to use it etc. (I've got the hang of it now though) but I'm still unsure how to go about getting the film developed. Whilst at uni my housemate (on a photography course) would develop and scan them for me completely free of charge but now I am back in my home town and can no longer access those facilities. I know Boots can do colour film but it's £6 every time and I'm not sure where I can go for black and white film. I'm aware you can buy your own kit cheaply but I don't have enough space/experience with that so would rather steer away from that option.

I prefer for the photos to be digital scans as opposed to physical prints so does anyone know where I could go for this? Also, can I trust ebay? Does anyone know of a service on ebay they have used and have had decent results?

Thank you!!

Amy

no need to read through loads of threads... just the one tutorial (it's all in the first post really)

https://www.talkphotography.co.uk/tutorials/film-developing-in-the-uk.99/
 
As Carl says b&w is a doddle, so long as you have a sink a dark bag and a bucket you can't go wrong. However, if you don't want to develop your own then Asda (if yours has the facility) are ok or there are still many places that develop mono and colour film. The cost of scans is probably the most expensive part of the process and it would probably be cost effective in the long run to purchase your own scanner. An Epson V500 can be had for about £100 and will hold its value if you find film isn't your thing.

Here's a link to the main developers web sites.

https://www.talkphotography.co.uk/tutorials/film-developing-in-the-uk.99/

And one for developing your own black and white, it really is very easy.

https://www.talkphotography.co.uk/tutorials/how-to-develop-black-and-white-fillum.101/

And lastly welcome to the best bit of the forum.

Andy
 
Damn it.... beaten to the punch. :D
 
If you don't want to do it yourself
- Colour film: Photo Express (£5, but £4.5 with a talkphotography discount). Easily the better of the cheap places (ChrisR might disagree)
- BnW: I'd just send to Illford
 
If you don't want to do it yourself
- Colour film: Photo Express (£5, but £4.5 with a talkphotography discount). Easily the better of the cheap places (ChrisR might disagree)
- BnW: I'd just send to Illford

I still use Photo Express from time to time, and think they are excellent. I'm tending to use Filmdev these days, on marginal factors like negs sleeved in 6s, TIFFs available, etc. £5 a film for medium res scans, but they don't charge return postage, and they Do do 120 (C41 only, though).

@deathjunket you could have look at the handy price estimator which covers some of the better labs, and gives prices for BW, C41 and E6 (ie traditional black and white, colour negative, and colour transparency/slide/reversal, respectively).

Snappy Snaps and Max Spielmann in many town centres will give you a process +CD for a fiver or so in an hour or so... (actually, writing that, I realise I haven't checked their prices for a while). They and Asda will give you a low res scan which works out at a couple of megapixels in digital terms, often over-sharpened, but the basic processing is usually OK. Only 35mm C41.
 
...beware of Snappysnap as I've been quoted from £3-£7 just for dev.....of course I had my film (120) dev for £3 but it wasn't the handy shop near where I live (which quoted £7)
 
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SnappySnaps can be hugely variable both on quality and price.

So just like new secondhand cameras it's best to test them first
 
. I'm aware you can buy your own kit cheaply but I don't have enough space/experience with that so would rather steer away from that option.

Home develoing doesn't require much space and as for experience, you're only going to get that if you do it!

Seriously, DIY developing is by a long way the cheapest and imo the most satisfying way to develop film.
 
Absolutely completely and definately DIY your own black and white then scan the negatives. The kit is cheap to buy on Ebay and, once you can do it it really is easy. I've taught primary school children to do it - and best of all its essentially free!
 
I am sanguine over the suggestion that DIY "kitchen-sink developing" is 'cheaper' than commercial... these days, if ever, I think.

In years gone, it 'might' have been a bit cheaper, but by the 90's, the advent of the dry-to-dry 1hr mini-lab often meant it practically wasn't.

I have recently pulled my old dev tank out the cupboard to do a couple of rolls of B&W after my o/h & daughter had bee muttering they wanted to give it a go, and was pondering the matter of photographic economics of old! I was trying to remember how much it used to cost, and if my ailing memory serves, when I was a student in the early '90's, it typically cost about £10 a roll of 36, for a film + process & prints, if you went to Boots

B&W tended to be more expensive than high-street colour-print, and mail-order labs were often not a lot cheaper, but would give you bigger prints for your money, and/or a free-film of dubious quality! Slide film was cheaper, because it only needs developing, and I think that Jessops 'pre-paid' slide film, was about £7 a roll of 36; when shot you dropped it in the envelope that came in the box and they dev and sent back the mounted slides, you had paid for with the film. But then I recall ASDA doing a similar deal 'pre-paid' on colour-print film, for about the same price, at one time.

Cheapest way about it by far though was to buy 'bulk-length' film-stock and self-load it into re-usable canisters; I think that worked out about £1 a 36exp film, depending on what you bought; I tended to get 'cheap' slide film for colour and 'cheap' B&W; Colour-Print was a bit beyond the kitchen sink(after you had dev'd the negs)! But E6 chemistry for slides wasn't that cheap, and ISTR still worked out at around £3 a roll u-mounted, so it didn't save much very over 'cheap' high-street film and mail-order dev, really. B&W did though. But either way.. I don't think it 'saved' much money! I think like most, I probably spent MORE, simply because I 'felt I was saving money, and in consequence probably actually just shot more film! All good fun though.

In Y2K, I bought the dedicated film scanner I still use, as I had lost my dark-room, and looking at digital cameras of the era, they were expensive and / or no great shakes. On the economics I reckoned a film scanner, that delivered almost 10MPix resolution was still far better and cheaper than anything that took direct to digital pictures, and I could kitchen sink, cheap C41 colour-print film, as easily and more cheaply than C41 slide, and go neg-to-print digitally rather than in the dark-room... the wonderful leap to a pentium 2 computer with a 1.33Mhz processor and wopping 8Mb of RAM over my 'old' 90MHz Pentium 1 with its meagre 4Mb, trying to handle 10Mb fles from the scanner, however proved the futility of that plan! And its only in the last couple of years the computer's have caught up, and allowed me to exploit scanning software with the wonders of mult-pass scanning, ad 64bit colour depth! Great scans from an old machine! But I digress!

Economics of modern kitchen sink developing? I bought a set of IIlford B&W Chemistry in the summer, to teach my daughter film developing, I think for £25; 1/2 litre, at 1+9 concentration for 'quality' gives enough solution for about 15 films; at 1+14 for 'economy', offers enough soup for about 21 or 22 films, so costs about £2 a film. E6 slide chemistry, or C41 colour-print chemistry 'kits' are around the £40-£50 mark; solutions, if bottled and not cross-contaminated or anything can usually be used to do three developments, and f you are canny enough to batch up films to develop together like that, you might get 20-30 rolls from a kit, so again, about £2 a roll.. it's not a lot different to doing B&W....

And my local ASDA only charge £2 to do a straight dev-only on a roll of C41 colour-print film! (and an extra £1 to scan it for you)

So when you add maybe £10 to buy a developing tank, and anther £15 for a changing bag to load it, possibly more for measuring grads to mix your chemicals, possibly some concertina bottles to keep mixed chemicals in? There's little 'saving' to be found, even if you do enough films in your kitchen sink to defray the cost of the kit!

It IS fun, though! and as has been said, to soup a film, you really don't need much more clear space than to make a cup of coffee in the kitchen, and the 'stuff' you need packs away into a couple of shoe'boxes or a medium sized stak-a-box.

But you still want to make a 'display' picture from your negative or transparency. Colour printing has always alluded me; I do have a colour enlarger, but its a complicated process & I never had the patience or money to master it. B&W is a lot easier & simpler; but this does demand more hardware and more space; though under-stairs or 'cupboard' dark rooms used to be popular and didn't demand a spare room conversion; alternately, we used the bath-room; Piece of conti-board folded down on to the bath made a wet-bench for developing the prints, and there was usually enough room at the end for the enlarger on a upturned box.... curtain over the door and window to make it 'dark', and you changed the light-bulb to a safe light, often with an adaptor to power the enlarger-lamp, when you 'set-up'! But I have to confess, the 'faff' of trying to set up in the bath-room in a 'family' home, after kids had gone to bed, WAS main reason for buying that scanner 16 years ago!

Scanning to digital, does make t a lot more do-able; and cheaper Web-cam type film scanners are often under £30 or so, and while they tend not to offer the same level of detail you might get from a dedicated scanner that offers greater colour depth & such, for web-display and small-size printing, they are fine; cheap, pretty quick ad easy to use ad don't take up much space & personally I reckon I get better scans from mine than I do from ASDA.

If you WANT to DIY your own developing, then, as said, it is do-able; it doesn't take that much space or kit; but you do it because you want to DIY, not because it's going to be 'cheaper''; it probably wont be, and 'risk' you will wreck a film,from a loading error, mis-timing a soak, or cross-contaminating your chemicals, especially as you 'learn' the process, you are likely to waste a far bit to that 'learning' as well.

But, answering direct question; check out your local ASDA, other super-markets and high-street photo-shops & compare prices.

It's rather galling, now, to be being told that 'digital is so much cheaper than film'.... to think I can get a roll of Agfa from pound-land for a quid, and get it dev'd & scanned for another £3 at ASDA, to work out CHEAPER to process, now, than all the 'faff' of self-loading bulk film and kitchen-sink developing 'to save money' cost me quarter of a century ago! And get that with my old Olympus OM10 and a couple of good lenses, that all in might only be worth £40-50, or even my £5 XA2 compact, rather than the couple of grand of electric picture-making parafanalia sat in my camera bag!!?!?! Could have bought a LOT of film that could!!!
 
On the economics: my local lab charges £5 per sheet to process 5x4 film (because they don't want to do it). 1 litre of chemicals will process 4 or 6 sheets in my tank (the number depends on how brave I feel) so given that the stop last forever and the fixer does a lot of film (and I use Rodinal so it's only about 20cc of developer per tank load) I think home processing is cheaper. Plus the faffing of packing up 4 sheets to transport to a processor or risk to the post.

I did the maths on film costs years ago and worked out that on my expected remaining lifespan and my rate of exposing 5x4 film, I'd save money by using film until the cost of a digital camera that could equal the performance of 5x4 film dropped to around £800. I'm not certain that they've even made one yet, let alone at that price.

The big advantage to doing it yourself is that you can exercise a lot of control over the results by adjusting developing times, agitation and even the developer used. This applies whatever the economics.
 
@Teflon-Mike Colour (C41 in particular) is a different matter than black and white. You can get good quality C41 process and medium scan for a fiver a roll, or there's Asda as you say (if your local one still does it; scans usually over-sharpened, but good enough as a sort of contact sheet equivalent). Black and white these days is another matter, commercially. Cheapest quality shop I know of for black and white process only is Photo Hippo at £5.50 a roll plus postage, or Ilford at £6.50 plus freepost. Typically a 3-10 day turnround, too. If you add scans it gets a lot dearer; for low res scans (same res as Asda) the cheapest is Ilford at £9.50, but if you want a medium res scan (say around 6 mp) then the cheapest is AG Photolabs at £11.87 plus freepost. Scanning tends to add delays there, too.

So far, I reckon I'm well ahead of the game already since laying out around £70 on tank and chems around this time last year. I already had the scanner. I've done way more than ten films (my Rondinax tank only takes 20ml a time). And it gets done more or less when I want it done (there's some negotiation needed about using "chemicals" in the kitchen!). The biggest issues are probably processing mistakes and dust. Films done by Peak in Xtol are much nicer than I can achieve in Ilfosol 3... but I'm learning, slowly! And it all adds to the fun.
 
...just to add that Asda might\should dev C41 B\w film for £2 not sure about scanning for the usual £1 or what the results would be like with the machine on auto.
 
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