I know we have some camera buffs here. Not talking to you, exactly.
But do you have undeveloped film floating around? Or some that never took pictures at all?
I bought a box at a flea market and there are 3 rolls of used film. I’m tempted to have them developed.
I had a couple of toss away cameras that were older a few years ago. I had them developed. It was the Jr. prom of my oldest kid. He claims he never took pictures with those things. Eh, I don’t know. They coulda been left here by a friend or in a car.
During one of my periodic cleanouts, I discovered a couple of rolls of undeveloped film I had put away. They had to be at least ten years old, probably even older. II took them in, had them developed, and got back prints that were nothing but random patterns of blurred color.
I did similar when I was getting rid of my last film cameras. Which was 2014ish, but they’d last been used more like 1995ish.
IIRC I had a few rolls of unused film and a couple rolls of used film, plus one roll still in a 35mm camera body. Got a couple of decent frames, many with artifacts wrecking the pic, and a lot of light-fried nothing.
I probably take more pix in a week now than I did in 6 months back in even my most prolific film camera days.
I had some undeveloped film from my mother when she died. I found a roll or two of 35mm film, I waited 10+ years to have them developed, they came out ok, there wasn’t much on there, but it didn’t cost that much.
She also had some really old, like early 70s, cartridge type film. When I first got them no one could really develop them, and one that could it cost way too much and they wanted to keep copyright on anything they developed. I ended up finding a place 5 or so years ago that could do it and it cost me $15 or so per roll. I think it cost me $250 or so. I got a few photos out of it, most of them pretty degraded, but I did have one of me, my mother, my grandmother, and my great grandmother. Not a great photo, but still nice to have.
I have a disposable film camera I took on a camping trip in the late 90s, took all the pictures on the roll but never got developed for whatever reason. I still sometimes wonder if I would get any decent results if I tried getting the film developed now. Sounds like it would be a real crapshoot getting anything good out of it at this point. It’s too bad; I like to imagine I have some award-winning nature shots on there. I took one of 3 giant owls sitting on a tree branch, but I’m not sure if I got it before they started to fly away.
For sure the image quality will be shite. And would have been even if you’d developed it the day after the shot was taken. Just because consumer film tech then was pitiful compared to the digital images we’re all used to now.
Lens quality on disposable cameras was also shite compared to what’s in your pocket now.
You might have had an A in dramatic composition & timing, but in all other respects it’d be a D. Once you add degradation over time …
FYI all - I am no film buff. But some quick Googling suggests you can get old film like that developed for about $10 per roll. That’s developed and scanned to JPEG, not photo-printed onto photopaper. Of course anyone with a modern color inkjet or laser printer at home can put a jpeg to paper pretty much instantly for zero cost.
Anyone sitting on old film in fear of the development costs is either flat broke, or mistaken.
I have a color laser. The price per page for toner is within a rounding error of a penny.
Yes, inkjets are much more expensive.
OTOH, I just checked: Walgreens charges $4.49 for an 8x10 glossy printed from JPEG. Decent bet your typical home inkjet with typical ripoff-priced ink can beat that price to death.
I have a roll that has been in my camera since 2007. It’s infrared, and the local photo finishers that processed infrared have long since closed, so if I ever want to have it developed, I’ll probably have to send off on the odd chance that anything will come of it.
I don’t. My former spouse, the hoarder, had put a bunch of rolls of film in a bag in a cupboard and they never got developed. They had many photos of our kids and the like, and by the time they resurfaced, it had been 20 years and many moves later. They of course were degraded to the point of being landfill by then.
No, and I just realized that I have never owned a camera that uses film. My first camera was a digital Cannon which, after it developed a problem, was replaced by another digital Cannon. It’s been lying on a shelf in my home office for years. I honestly believe that, with today’s technology, my phone camera is every bit as good or better. The exception would be long range shots. My Cannon has a special telephoto lens I can attach for very impressive long distance shots.
Nothing I bought anyway. I transitioned away from film in about 1999 when I got my first digital camera, and didn’t keep any of that stuff. I however have picked photography back up as a hobby in the last couple of years, and have got back into film1. So the oldest film I’ve got has a 2025 manufacturing date.
That said, I do get old cameras and gear on Ebay sometimes, and it’s not uncommon for it to show up with a half-shot roll of film from the early 2000s or late 90s in it. I had one roll developed and it looked terrible, so I haven’t bothered with the rest.
That seems low. Typically $10 or thereabouts would be the developing, and scanning would cost somewhere upwards of about $7 depending on the resolution. I’d really like to know where you seeing that!
Honestly, I can’t seem to get below about $18 per roll and one week, regardless of whether I take it to my local lab or mail it somewhere. Shipping is the killer; places like Brooktree or The Darkroom are cheaper and faster, but shipping the film there evens out the cost and time.
My quicky Googling defers to your superior experience. I did hit this website to see their pricing, but I did not dig into exactly what the price included, nor how much any extras cost.
A slightly different but related topic. Cleaning up the garage recently, we discovered five 10.5 inch reels of quarter inch tape which apparently contain recordings I made with a couple of bands decades ago.
So I’m now looking at possibilities to transfer the recordings to digital format (the Revox they were recorded on is long gone, of course).
Same general issue: types of media we took for granted years ago are almost historical footnotes nowadays…
Oh God, where to? I haven’t had film developed since those disposable cameras about 7-8 years ago. Walmart electronics film lab. Do they still do that?
I might, if I had reason to believe that there was something of sentimental value on the rolls. But it’d have to be worth the high cost nowadays of finding any place that can develop it.
But for something from some random stranger’s camera, that I don’t even know the provenance of? I probably wouldn’t even do that if it were free. Whatever they have on that film, I don’t even want to know. Best case, it’s random vacation and birthday pictures of people I don’t care about. Worst case… <shudder>