Re: Developing film, beginner question!

maireadmarie

A friend told me she has her films developed by a shop who just do the whole processing by machine. Could this be accurate? Because I thought the darkroom was still necessary to develop the film, and that machines just printed. Sorry if this seems a stupid question, I told you I'm a beginner
Second question, you know those film scanners you can buy to use at home? They talk about scanning film, do they mean negatives, which have been produced in the old traditional darkroom? This question led to the first one above....

jlang

The machine would be something like one of these from Fuji. It's basically an automated darkroom which opens the film cartridge and processes the film with each chemical as one might do in a darkroom but all done inside the dark in the machine. The times etc are configurable but I'd expect most shop processors use the same settings once calibrated.

maireadmarie

Thanks so much for the quick reply - so my friend got it right! Are there similar machines for home use, do you know? Or do those film scanners need negatives? Thanks also for the link, JL!

Mairead

Morlar

I think depending on the scanner they can read negatives - there are also high end ones that are dedicated negative scanners that offer high quality digital copies.

digitalbeginner

Try having a look at this http://www.imaging-resource.com/SCAN/CS8K/C8A.HTM. It's a bit heavy but part of it answers your question. This is for a Nikon Scanner but you can also find reviews of other scanners on this site as well.

DotOrg

jlang wrote:

an automated darkroom which opens the film cartridge

the machine doesn't do that, the lab operator still has to extract the start of the film for the machine to process it

Roen

Yep, they still hang on to bottle openers for that!

elven

I cut myself trying to open one of those damn things, I don't know what on earth I was doing wrong but it took me half an hour, in the changing bag, fumbling about. Ah, the wonders of blessed digital photography

maireadmarie

Thanks to you all for helping me, a dumb beginner! I only got back today, I'll get onto the links now too.
Yes, I've read about those bottle-openers!
Very best wishes,
Mairead