Loading…
6
Warning: my lab guy said 1 in 4 rolls of color film he develops now comes back blank, and I'm not sure who to blame
I was dropping off four rolls of Portra 400 at my local lab in Boise last week and the owner mentioned something that stuck with me. He keeps a tally on the wall and said about 25 percent of the color rolls people bring in wind up blank, and it has tripled since 2021. His take is that people are loading their cameras wrong or trusting old eBay bodies with gummed up advance gears. My take is that a blank roll is usually a light leak or a shutter that's off at high speeds, not user error, and blaming the shooter feels lazy. I ran three rolls through my grandfather's Nikkormat just to test it and every frame came out fine, so maybe it really is the camera and not me. Which one do you think it is, bad gear or bad handling, and has your lab been seeing the same numbers?
1 comments
Log in to join the discussion
Log In1 Comment
anna_shah912d ago
I used to roll my eyes at people who blamed their gear and figured it was almost always user error, loading the film wrong or not checking the rewind. Then my buddy's old Pentax started eating rolls and we found out the shutter was dragging at 1/1000, so now I lean more toward the camera being the real problem. Has your lab guy actually tested any of those blank rolls or is he just going off the number of people who complain?
5