I mailed off my gigantic stow of slide film to be processed, and just got them back the other day. Two week turn around from when I mailed them is about normal. Of course, because half of it was Kodachrome, it went to Dwayne’s lab in Kansas, the world’s last Kodachrome Lab. My last order was more than a year ago, and I’d had no problems. Since then, I’d heard some word of their quality control getting worse – dust and scratches and general stuff that makes you pull your hair out.
Seems I drew the short straw. While I’m a magnet for dust at the best of times, my boxes of slides had visibly large specs of dust sitting on them when I opened the taped-up boxes. Some of my Kodachrome slides have scratches, and at least one has three very noticeably deep scratch marks pressed into it. not really something you can fix with a blower brush and some determination. Something that’s thrown me right off has been the presence of some sort of string. If you’re ever been around bales of hay, it’s similar to the twine used to tie them up – tiny flat little synthetic threads. It’s black, seems to appear pretty regularly in the boxes, and has found it’s way in with the slide mounter and been glued into the paper slide mounts on a few occasions. Why that sort of material would be anywhere near a professional lab is beyond me.
Luckily my final slides from Alaska escaped unharmed, but damn. It seems you cant even rely on the world’s last Kodachrome Lab to have some high standards. As much as I love Kodachrome-64, and those last three rolls of K-25 I have left, Dwayne’s have made it a risk to use. A good example of what having a monopoly on a product does.
I’ll be looking for a more local E-6 lab with a reasonable price, and I’ll report back. In the mean time, Black and white Photo will still process and mount a roll of $20 each. Their plastic mounts are much better than Dwaynes cardboard, and if I wasn’t so tight on funds I’d go with them without a second though. Lighthouse lab is looking good right now, I have a roll of Sensia 100 sitting on my shelf and I might as well give them a shot. They did well with my 4×5″ Ektachromes.