Copyright information

All of these pictures are copyright © 1999 Stephen M. Dunn. You may view these pictures for your own personal enjoyment, and you may print one copy of each for your own personal enjoyment. You may not redistribute, edit, or sell these pictures, or use them in any manner other than as permitted above, without prior consent from me.

Background

I'm an amateur photographer who also likes to put pictures up on his Web site. Many consumer photo labs now offer services that bridge the gap between traditional film and digital photography. I decided to try out the services at Black's - partly from curiosity, and partly for practical reasons. I usually shoot negative film because I want to add the prints to my photo albums and/or show them to friends, but sometimes I want to go and take pictures that might end up on my Web page but I don't care about getting prints. I'd rather shoot slides for this, but I have no access to a slide scanner, so I can't scan them in myself.

I should state up front that I'm more critical than the average point-n-shooter. I don't actually expect perfection, but that's the standard against which I'm measuring the results. So as you read my complaints and negative thoughts, keep this in mind - I may be picking on relatively small faults which would not matter for most people. All prices are in CAD, and may have changed between when I had the services performed and when you read this.

Develop and scan to Internet

I shot a roll of Kodak E100VS (a 100-speed professional slide film with highly saturated colours) at the Toronto Zoo, and brought it to Black's. I had them develop the slides and scan them to the Internet. Scanning adds $6 to the cost of the roll; for this, you get to access your images at a resolution of 768x512, and the images stay online for a month (during which time you can of course download them and keep them on your own machine forever). I chose the following sample image of Simba the lion cub for further testing:

(If you want to see the rest of the images, look at http://www.stevedunn.ca/photos/toronto_zoo/. Images numbered 0101 through 0136 are from this roll; 0001 through 0035 are from a roll of E100S taken earlier in the year and also processed and scanned at Black's. Incidentally, some of these images are over-exposed and some are under-exposed; the scans of those images are pretty much useless, whereas the slides themselves don't look anywhere near as bad. Simba comes by his good looks honestly; his mother is 0132 and his dad is 0125, 0126, and 0127.)

Evaluation

• Shadow detail: There are areas in the image file which show up as black, but which have some detail in the slide; there are also areas which are very dark, almost black in the image file but which have much more visible colour in the slide. For example, near the top left corner, there's an area of black with a few out-of-focus patches of colour; this black area is actually not black in the slide.
• Highlight detail: There is white fur around Simba's muzzle. The fur that's in the sun shows up as essentially featureless white in the scan; the slide shows detail.
• Overall colour fidelity: The scan does a good job of staying true to the colours on the slide.
• Frame coverage: The scan includes the entire frame. This is better than you'd get by taking a print and putting it on a flatbed scanner, since consumer labs don't print the entire frame.

Higher Resolution

Black's actually scans images at 1536x1024 (the same resolution as a Picture CD). If you want to download images at this resolution, though, you have to pay an extra $2 per image. You do this when viewing the images, not when you submit the roll, so you can look at the results and only pay extra for the ones you really want at a higher resolution. Still, I think that's awfully expensive if you might want higher-resolution images; after about a dozen rolls of keepers, you could buy yourself a decent slide scanner that will do an even better job - higher resolution (2400-3000 dpi), better shadow and highlight detail.

The high resolution image is almost a quarter of a megabyte. To view it, click here.

Evaluation

The high-resolution scan loses shadow and highlight detail, just like the lower-resolution scan. Colour fidelity is the same. This is not surprising; I would expect that the lower-resolution scan is probably produced by shrinking the higher-resolution scan.

Black's labels the high-resolution scan "Professional resolution." This is not accurate; it's only about 1000 dpi. A professional, scanning 35mm slides/negatives, would be more likely to scan at 2000-3000 dpi, which will capture 4-9 times as much detail. A professional would expect better shadow and highlight detail. A professional would also scan and save in a format which does not perform lossy compression; the JPEG format intentionally discards some detail and makes minor colour adjustments in order to reduce file size, which is fine for Web viewing, but for building an image library and/or digital editing, you want to work with the best possible image file.

Print from scan

For $4.99, you can order a 5x7" print, to be generated from the scanned image (8x10" is also available for a higher price). I ordered one. (Sorry, I haven't scanned it in, so you'll have to take my word for my observations.)

Evaluation

• Resolution: Disappointing. Just holding it at a reasonable viewing distance, you can see that Simba's whiskers have the jaggies (just as you can in the 768x512 image above, but it's even more obvious in the print). It also just doesn't look ... right, but to find out why you have to look at it with a magnifier. When you do, you discover that the pixels are square. That's not unexpected - after all, the pixels in the image above are square - but it does detract from image quality. It looks even worse on paper than it does on a monitor, because at least on a monitor the pixels aren't square (each pixel is made up of a collection of non-square phosphors with dark space between them).
• Shadow detail: What shadow detail? Way worse than in the scan. In the picture above, look at the red dot to the left (as you view it) of Simba's head. There's a definite green patch to the left of it. On the print, it's almost invisible. Even worse, the shaded white fur on his muzzle is close to black on the print.
• Highlight detail: Even worse than the scan. In the scan, the sunlit white fur on his muzzle blends together. In the print, the area that was printed as pure white stands out because the print was done at such high contrast that the slightly less bright white area around it is obviously less white.
• Colour fidelity: Poor. His fur is a much deeper brown than it should be, with red overtones in some areas. The shadow on his front legs, which appears slightly blue but detailed in the scan, is deep indigo with very little detail on the print.
• Frame coverage: Not a fair test; a 5x7" print is not in the same proportions as a 35mm frame (you'd need 5x7.5" for that).

Digital print from slide, #1

Black's can make a print from a slide. They do this digitally. Digital printing potentially offers numerous advantages over traditional optical printing (assuming that the traditional process doesn't involve tricks like dodging and burning) - better control over high-contrast scenes, ability to manipulate some parts of the image separately from others, etc. Black's offers the choice of the best colour match to the slide (generally recommended for slides in good shape) or best overall colour (generally recommended for older slides which have faded or experienced colour shifts); I picked best colour match to the slide, since the slide is new and in excellent condition. For a 5x7" print, the fee was $5.99.

Evaluation

• Shadow detail: Very good.
• Highlight detail: Lousy. In order to get good shadow detail, they did two things: they reduced contrast (a slide can have a much greater contrast range than can be represented in a print, so if you want to get it all, you have to reduce contrast), and printed the image much lighter than the slide. This sacrificed highlight detail; the low contrast also results in an image with very little snap. The section of Simba's tummy, visible on the lower right of the image, printed as almost pure white - even though the slide, and the scan, clearly show much of it as light brown. The light-coloured fur below his left ear was washed out. The background also printed much too light; it's a bit distracting.
• Colour fidelity: Poor, and particularly disappointing since I asked for the best colour match to the slide. Again, you can't expect a print to match a slide's colour range, but this is a long way off. The print from scan had too much red in his fur; this print has none at all. The blue tone in the shadowed area on his front legs is too strong.
• Resolution: Better than the print from scan, but it still doesn't look quite right. The fur detail on his right cheek (left as you view the image) looks quite coarse, and the out-of-focus patches of colour in the background look grainy (much moreso than in the scan). Under an 8x loupe, the reasons become visible: there is horizontal banding, and you can just see the pixel structure of the image.

Digital print from slide, #2

In mid-2000, Black's started rolling out Fuji Frontier digital minilabs (see here for my experiences with them). Black's advertises that these machines make better prints from your negatives than traditional optical minilabs do; what they don't advertise is that the Frontier isn't restricted to printing from negatives. It can do slides, too, so I took the same slide back in. The cost was around $7 (I had it done as part of some other work, and the bill isn't perfectly clear as to how it breaks down) for a 5x7". Another advantage: it's done in-store, so instead of waiting a week or so for them to ship it elsewhere, have it printed, and get it back, your print can be done in under an hour (if they're not too busy).

Evaluation

• Shadow detail: Almost perfect. Areas that should be black are black; areas that should be very dark but not black are very dark but not black, and are the right shades of colour. There is one spot on the slide that's almost pure black but not quite; it shows up as black on the print. No big deal; in an area that dark, there's really no detail - only a very slight shade of colour.
• Highlight detail: Very good. There is some loss of detail in the white fur on Simba's muzzle.
• Colour fidelity: Very good. Simba's fur isn't quite as saturated as it is on the slide, but it's unreasonable to expect a print to match the saturation of an extremely saturated slide film. Shaded fur is coloured correctly - the excessive blue in some of the other prints is not present here.
• Resolution: Very good. No digital artifacts (jaggies, individual pixels, or banding) are visible to the naked eye; under an 8x loupe, jaggies are barely visible.

My own inkjet prints from the scans

Just for fun, I took both the 768x512 and 1536x1024 scans and printed them using a colour inkjet printer. The printer is not a photo-quality printer, and I printed it on regular paper rather than photo-quality paper. No image editing or colour correction was done. The print driver was set to print at its highest quality setting. This is not really a fair test since the printer is not advertised as photo-quality and since I did not use decent paper for it.

Evaluation

• Shadow detail: Fairly good. Regular paper can't reproduce dark blacks like photo-quality paper can, so there's less contrast between black and dark colours; photo-quality paper would definitely work better here. The out-of-focus areas in the dark background show up as well in the inkjet prints as they do in the image file above - not as well as in the slide, but better than in the print from scan.
• Highlight detail: Poor. Highlights block up, and there are odd dots of colour in the highlight areas. Photo-quality paper would also help here, as would a photo-quality inkjet printer; photo-quality printers generally use additional inks with lighter colours, for better representation of light shades.
• Resolution: Simba's whiskers, which looked jagged in the print from scan, look much better, even at only 768x512. However, even in the 1536x1024 image, fur detail is lacking. There is also very visible banding, particularly in dark areas.
• Colour fidelity: Fair. The orange tint in his fur is overemphasized. The blue tint to his shadowed front legs is similar to the slide. Image quality is reduced because of seemingly random dots of colours showing up all over the place (not just in the highlights mentioned above).

Conclusions

The scan-to-Internet service and its 768x512 images are adequate for most users, who will simply send email to their friends and family saying "Hey, look at these pictures of Uncle Joe's birthday!" Some people will download them and put the images on their Web pages; most people will find the images adequate for that, too. Really, really picky people like me will wish for more. Such people should really be using Photo CD instead.

The 5x7" print from the scan-to-Internet service was disappointing. It's obviously of much, much lower quality than a traditional print. I'd hate to think what an 8x10" would look like.

The first digital slide-to-print was better, but doesn't appear to be well suited to high-contrast images like this one. Resolution isn't as much of an issue here; a larger print would not look significantly worse. The Fuji Frontier slide-to-print is wonderful.

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