Dixons or Saxons ?

PinzaC55

Striker
Just a little question I have often wondered about here. I've recently bought a Plustek 8200i SE negative/slide scanner and have been scanning my old negatives and slides with it. My first photos were taken in 1977 with my dads Zenith-E but in 1978 I got a Praktica LTL3 which gave much better results allowing for my shit skills as a photographer. I used to get them developed at either Dixons or Saxons except for slides which I shot on AGFA CT18 film which was then processed by AGFA.
Now here's the thing; my slides all have perfect colour whichever camera they were taken on , but about half the prints have a colour cast ranging from light pink to red , however the negatives usually don't have this problem.
From about 1980 onwards the colour of both prints and negatives is very good with no pinkish tint at all.
So were either Saxons or Dixons just really bad at developing prints or is there another reason ?
 


It's probably more down to the individual film types rather than the way they were processed. Colour films (positive slides or negatives) are essentially dye based and dyes fade. However different brands or types will use different dyes or even different cellulose carrier that will last better or worse than others. When I was scanning some old slides recently I found that the ones taken on Kodachrome had near perfect colours while others were way off (including some Agfa ones, as it happens). The colour casts can often be fixed in software, though not always easily. Black and white generally doesn't have this problem - just silver crystals which don't change much at all.

EDIT: I've just read your post again and it seems you were scanning prints rather than negatives, which I'd based the above paragraph on....in that case, it's another step removed from the original and yes, probably more down to the quality of paper used by the shop than anything else. Colour prints do generally fade (and shift colours) over time unless done on top quality paper (and probably more than the negatives would have faded or colour shifted). It might be fiddly but you'll probably get better results scanning the negatives if you're able to.
 
Just a little question I have often wondered about here. I've recently bought a Plustek 8200i SE negative/slide scanner and have been scanning my old negatives and slides with it. My first photos were taken in 1977 with my dads Zenith-E but in 1978 I got a Praktica LTL3 which gave much better results allowing for my shit skills as a photographer. I used to get them developed at either Dixons or Saxons except for slides which I shot on AGFA CT18 film which was then processed by AGFA.
Now here's the thing; my slides all have perfect colour whichever camera they were taken on , but about half the prints have a colour cast ranging from light pink to red , however the negatives usually don't have this problem.
From about 1980 onwards the colour of both prints and negatives is very good with no pinkish tint at all.
So were either Saxons or Dixons just really bad at developing prints or is there another reason ?
Funnily enough, I too started with a Zenit-E bought from Charlie Eagles (ex-Saxons) and my exposures, after owning the camera for over a year started to take on the pinkish colour your talking about. i mentioned this to Charlie at the time and all we could come up with was keeping the rols of film in the camera for a period of time . Meaning not running a roll straight off. Changed the Zenit to a Olympus shortly afterwards.
 
Funnily enough, I too started with a Zenit-E bought from Charlie Eagles (ex-Saxons) and my exposures, after owning the camera for over a year started to take on the pinkish colour your talking about. i mentioned this to Charlie at the time and all we could come up with was keeping the rols of film in the camera for a period of time . Meaning not running a roll straight off. Changed the Zenit to a Olympus shortly afterwards.

Thanks for the replies. One thing I forgot to make clear was that because (?) the slides were processed by AGFA they came back perfect, but AGFA 35mm film had the reddish tint when developed which suggests it was the developers fault. I can't see how it was a matter of leaving the film in the camera for a while since when I finished a CT-18 film I yanked it straight out and posted it immediately because I had already paid for processing of course.
 

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