Iceland is a bit of a special case since it is a very low volume/high materials cost market, but if you can find someone who will properly develop your film for less than 10 dollars a roll, I would still think that was a very good deal.
C 41 PROCESSING AT HOME MANUAL
Given 8 dollars a roll from a real lab, I think it is quite a reasonable expense.įor what it's worth, I no longer develop color film for people as I found that the costs and effort of manual processing were so high and the possible fees I could charge were so low, that I never once made money doing it. While C41 is not all that tricky, the chemicals are less stable and more expensive than their black and white counterparts, and the process is more finicky since it has to be run at a high temperature and with short developing times (sometimes it can be tricky to get very even development for sheet film or 120 when using rotary tubes and short development times).
While I think home black and white processing is an economical and reasonable choice, home c41 processing is more for people who really enjoy the technical side of photography and find the act of processing itself fun. Tetenal makes some C41 and E6 kits in smaller quantities, so if you do decide to do it, you should look into that route. I would agree with Mike that, while possible, it is probably not worth the effort. I run a small custom lab in Iceland, and I have had experience processing C41 and E6 in a Jobo CPP2. I don't know what your lab charges but I would think really hard before going out a buying a processor. I don't know about Jobos but I have used photo therms for processing E6 and The processor did a rotten job of drying the film, we always had to soak the film in photo flo after processing and hang it to dry. so even if the processing time is only about 15 minutes the whole process is not all that quick.Ĥ. It can be rather time consuming considering that you must load each roll of film onto a spindle in the dark without kinking it. So you will need to use the entire gallon as saving it for the next session is not feasible.ģ. after you mix the chemistry there is no way It will last the three months between uses. if you look at the cost of kits And the amount of film they can process I think you will find the chemistry costs alone will be about $3.00 per roll.Ģ. You will be purchasing c41 chemistry in 1 gallon kits. Having owned a photo lab for 15 years I would advise against doing your own c41 processing for several reasons.ġ.