Film Commercial 35mm processing - recommendations

[Ricoh]

To begin with I hope I've posted this is in the right place.

Does anyone have any recommendations for commercial film processing in the UK?

It's the quotient of Quality / Cost I suppose (that maybe upside down but you get my drift hopefully). Some of the vendors I've looked at are quite expensive.

Not sure I could be bothered with home processing to be honest.
Cheers,
Steve.

 

[jai]

Do you shoot colour? Or black and white?

It does seem like it is easier and cheaper to find places that do C41 process. And it's all pretty much the same. If that is what you are shooting, getting a high quality scan becomes the most critical and expensive part.

So if you really want the best Quality / Cost possible it will be if you go to a cheap lab (chemist?) to do the processing and then scan it yourself.

There is more of an art to processing proper black and white, you probably do want to go to a more serious (expensive) lab or do it yourself.

I'm in Australia so I am no help to you, but for other Australians I do recommend these guys (C41 only): Hillvale Photo

 

[Ricoh]

Thanks for the reply jai.
I'm currently shooting digital RAW and convert to monochrome in LR, as required. I'm wondering if i can get the same effects from digitised colour film and PPing as before? Colour processing is cheaper as you say.
When I was a youngster, I used to process my own B/W. I used to pre-heat the developer, time the development etc and the results were reasonably - well I thought they were good. Temperture would decay during development, no fancy heating trays for me, it seemed that B/W was less susceptible to temperature change compared to colour. I also used to buy film in length and load my own cassettes.

 

[jai]

That's interesting, my challenge is always to cool the developer down. In summer water comes out of the taps here at 28C which is definitely not ideal.

I have always liked black and white, but only recently got into film. Looking back on my digital black and white shots, they just don't compare to what i've been able to get with Tri-x.