Originally posted by BetterSense It doesn't make sense to me that scanning 35mm film is so difficult/hardtofind/expensive. I mean, given digital cameras, we have digital camera sensors. Why can't we just 'contact print' with a reasonable resolution digital sensor at extremely high throughput? I mean if a DSLR that shoots 5fps costs less than a grand, why can't we have a film scanner, which is the camera minus the lens and mirror box and a lot of subsystems?
It seems like film scanners use a linear CCD and multiple passes, which takes forever, which is probably why local minilabs don't scan at high resolutions, for throughput reasons.
It doesn't make sense to you because you aren't educated to the realities of the lab industry as it now sits. I attempted to enlighten you with my last post, I will take one more kick at it.
Department/Grocery store labs are not interested in producing quality at the corporate level. They never have been, they never will be.
They are interested in keeping you in the store for long enough that you will buy unrelated merchandise out of sheer boredom and they are interested in getting you in their door with your film rather than someone else's door so you will be bored and buy their unrelated junk rather than someone else's unrelated junk.
The photo lab is a marketing tool, nothing else.
If you walk into a Wal-Mart, do you ever see any really high end stuff for sale?
Let me answer that question.
No, you don't.
Why?
Because the company is interested in selling lots of low priced, and low quality merchandise, not fewer pieces of high end merchandise.
The Pentax apologists have a term for it that keeps rearing it's ugly head.
They call it good value for the dollar.
Is it really good value when it falls apart just on the wrong side of warranty and can't be repaired?
I don't think so, but no one seems to care what I think.
Why would you think their photolabs should have a different corporate mindset from the rest of the business?
I kind of hit on one company, but the corporate philosophy is the same at any big box retailer.
Photolabs are able to scan to multiple resolutions. What you are able to buy at the Quickie-Marts is the lowest quality setting.
They don't train their people to use the better quality settings because the training takes time, and running the larger amount of data takes time.
Time is money, and they aren't going to waste it on you, my idealistic friend.
They are going to take that money and drop it right into their shareholders pockets instead, since the shareholder is the important person in any company now, not the customer.
The customer is someone to be dealt with efficiently, fleeced for their money with cheap junk and gotten rid of as quickly as possible before they catch on to what is being done.
After all, there are more customers to "serve".