Tesco photo developing

I have used Tesco film processing services for a number of months now and sadly it is only now beginning to dawn on me that the quality of theservice is poor.

I have noted that the scans they make are rather low in resolution at around 300dpi at 6" x 4". 10" x 8" would be better option as the majority of people still using film I would say are semi-professionals. The colour is a bit washed out often and occasionally I get nasty scratches on negs. When I asked a member of staff what resolution they were scanning at he replied "normal resolution". If I had been in a better mood I would have fallen over on the floor laughing but sadly I was in grmpy old man mode and had to tell him that that was a completley ridiculous answer. To make matters worse his thick old lady of an assistant pipes up - "Oh I thought it was whatever resolution you set your camera at!" Words fail to describe the look I gave her.

I recently received back a CD and set of negatives. On casual examination of the negatives I noted that they had been badly cut removing part of the image from almost 15% of the images – 1 on every strip.

I considered that perhaps this was just a one off until today I received back another set with the same problems. I decided to examine all of the films I had submitted for processing recently. Of the twelve sets of prints and negatives readily to hand only two sets of negatives were correctly cut.

It is with a certain degree of hilarity therefore that I find myself referring to the inside flap of their print and negative folder where it says “Our staff are highly trained to give you the best possible results”. This text then goes on to emphasise the importance of leaving the negative strips in place and not to cut them at all and to “handle them carefully by the edges”.

This clearly is not the case. It is clear to me that at least some of their staff have not been trained properly at all in an extremely simple operation.

If you dont care about quality the price and convenience is good but the quality and professionalism (if it werent so sad) is laughable. My grumpy old man opinion - dont use them.