Back in December, Seth Dillingham posted about his experiences with SnapFish.Com on his web site. I’d never really looked seriously at businesses such as this which develop film, produce prints, and post scans on the web, but Seth’s post piqued my interest.
I finally settled on giving ClubPhoto.Com a try for a number of reasons — the major one being that I wasn’t really interested in prints of my film, and ClubPhoto.Com seemed to have the cheapest rates for simply processing and posting high quality scans (they then snail mail me back the negatives).
Overall, I am satisfied with the service I’ve received from ClubPhoto.Com. As Seth noted, these sorts of shops are obviously using automated processes and the developing quality you’ll find here is comparable to what you’d get if you drop your film off at the local drugstore or supermarket.
On the positive side, the turnaround for film processing is very quick even via snail mail. When I mail the photos from my office in Kalamazoo it usually takes only about 4 business days before ClubPhoto.Com (which is headquartered in Texas) has scans of the photos posted.
The only negative is that ClubPhoto.Com’s idea of a high quality scan usually ends up being a 400kb JPEG. My idea of a high quality scan is a 17mb TIFF file. But then, I guess they wouldn’t be able to offer their service that cheaply if they had to absorb the bandwidth charges that would accompany files that large.
But the service is otherwise almost perfect for people like me who don’t want to deal with (and pay for) prints, but aren’t quite ready to ditch their film camera for a digital model either.