Now, you’d think that they could answer a question a question as simple as that, wouldn’t you. I called three stores, spoke to managers and photo technicians, and no one could give me the right answer. But what I did discover was rather shocking.
Soon, no Walgreens stores will be able to develop your negatives. Like CVS, they too will be removing the machines, and instead, sending your film to an outside lab. It will take days, instead of hours. But the shocking part is that you don’t get your negatives back, you only get a disc at who knows what resolution.
You can’t even get them back by special request, says an employee of one of their stores. They just throw them out. Well, the images on that disc had better be at a pretty high resolution, like 12MP at least, and even that wouldn’t compensate for the loss of the original. What if they were scanned incorrectly, or had dust and scratches? What if the disc doesn’t mount, and has to be remade?
Meanwhile, Livingston Photo, who has been doing my film work lately, goes the extra mile by setting their Noritsu scanner, not to the minimum resolution of 1536 x 1024, but to 3088 x 2048. And they use a two-step process for burning to DVD, because apparently the Noritsu can’t burn anything but the lowest res directly to DVD. For a slight fee, they can also scan to a higher resolution, but to be honest, the standard 6MP images are quite good.
So, it looks as though 2013 will be the year the pharmacies finally throw in the towel on film developing. From this point on, they will only cater to the consumer digital market; you bring in your SD card, thumb drive or what have you, and they will print 4x6s, 8x10s, and possibly poster prints. They’ll just trade that C-41 developer (that they don’t replenish when they should) for a large-format printer/plotter, which will cost a lot less anyway.
At least that’s simple enough for them not to screw up. Hopefully.
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