Machine development

Hi all
I have just ventured into the world of medium format and will be developing my own B&W. I had originally asked my local camera shop how much it was to process a film of 120 colour reversal film (velvia 100) to slides.... the price???? I was told it would cost around 100 dollars for the roll of 15. This seemed like a lot of money to me. I'm guessing this will be done in a professional lab which develops them my hand. I recently went into Tokyo to ask a big company if they can develop the film. They said they develop 120 using a machine. Without making slides (eg just the negatives) it will cost me around 6 dollars per film. What are the benefits of getting the roll developed by hand? Are the results noticeably different (around 90 dollars different)? The lab that quoted 6 dollars is a huge company that has many camera shops around Tokyo and sells lots of Medium format cameras as well so I'm guessing they know what they are doing!
Thanks in advance
Mark

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Originally Posted by markfielding

Hi all
I have just ventured into the world of medium format and will be developing my own B&W. I had originally asked my local camera shop how much it was to process a film of 120 colour reversal film (velvia 100) to slides.... the price???? I was told it would cost around 100 dollars for the roll of 15. This seemed like a lot of money to me. I'm guessing this will be done in a professional lab which develops them my hand. I recently went into Tokyo to ask a big company if they can develop the film. They said they develop 120 using a machine. Without making slides (eg just the negatives) it will cost me around 6 dollars per film. What are the benefits of getting the roll developed by hand? Are the results noticeably different (around 90 dollars different)? The lab that quoted 6 dollars is a huge company that has many camera shops around Tokyo and sells lots of Medium format cameras as well so I'm guessing they know what they are doing!
Thanks in advance
Mark

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I'm far from an expert on this, but I've never heard of such an outlandish price for a single roll of film. $6 is about right. I can't think of any reason why hand development would be better, or anywhere near that expensive, unless they're providing high quality scans too. As long as you find a good lab, machine development should be fine. In fact, it should give more consistent results as long as the lab keeps their equipment up to spec.

Paul

Never heard of $100/roll for developing! I've had a bunch of it (mostly 35mm but some 120) processed over the years and it's always been under $10/roll - at least here in the US.

It is possible to do this by hand, not unlike how a lot of people do B&W processing, but as long as it's a decent lab there shouldn't be any advantage to it. I've had very few developing problems with E6 and none of them have been due to machinery (other than one 35mm slide that was stuck in a roller but I think that's a separate machine).

Thanks for the responses. Much appreciated. I'm going to go with the machine developing and hopefully there should be no problems.