It is a sad day for this camera collector – my neighborhood CVS has stopped processing film. Theirs was the last one-hour color lab (that I know of) near my home on Indianapolis’s Northwestside. Goodbye, $6 processing and scanning.

Just a few years ago I could get my color film processed all over town: Wal-Mart, Meijer, Target, Walgreens, CVS, and Costco. These labs have shut down one by one. Oh, for the halcyon days of Costco’s startlingly good processing and giant high-quality scans for about four bucks.
I do have options. A camera store on the Northside still has a one-hour lab. But their processing and scanning is expensive at about $15 per roll, and I’ve had too many of their scans feature stray hairs that got into their equipment. Of course I can keep sending film off to The Darkroom or to Dwayne’s Photo, the mail-order processors I use most. I send all of my medium-format and black-and-white film to them already, because the drug-store labs won’t process it. They both do very good work, and they process almost anything you care to send them, including defunct film formats such as 110 and 620. Their prices for processing and scanning are reasonable (but go up fast when you send in odd formats or ask for higher-resolution scans). But thanks to shipping charges the overall cost starts at $14 per roll, which isn’t much of a bargain. And then you have to wait a week, give or take, to get scans back.

I’m cheap and impatient. I’m thinking seriously about processing my own film. For an initial outlay of no more than $100, I can buy all the equipment I need to process black-and-white film. (The sources I read say that color film is trickier to process and many recommend just leaving color processing to the pro labs.) My scanner can handle 35mm negatives, but I’d want a scanner that can do medium-format film too. I think I could get a serviceable one for around $200. After the initial outlay, though, I can process film for less than a buck a roll.
Two things hold me back. First, I processed a roll of film once, in high school, and I thought it was the most boring thing I’d ever done. Second, my life is busy enough today that I wonder where I’d find the time to mess with it. It is just so convenient to drop off or mail in film.
I know that some of you reading this process your own film. What advice do you have to offer me?
Film is still a bargain compared to 30 years ago. Read about how this is true.
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