Another serious LF color film processing lab

[Drew Wiley]

Just made my first stop at Underdog Film Lab in Oakland,CA, very close to the Bay Bridge highway interchange. They are handling a substantial volume of film in there, and routinely do up to 8x10 in both C41 and E6. Have a very good inventory of new film for sale too, at least up to 4x5, as well as associated scanning and printing services if desired. Anyone who thinks film is in danger of dying off, at least in this region, is quite mistaken. And they aren't the only local lab processing it. Real busy; but nice folks with a lot of experience. They also have a drop off point across the Bay in SF at Glass Key Photo. They accept mail-in or parcel carrier orders too, of course.

[BrianShaw]

Thanks; good information. Is this a Public Service Announcement or an endorsement?

[Drew Wiley]

Dunno. My whole order is ready to pick up right now, less than 24 hrs later. That's faster than their regular predicted turnaround time of about 2 days for sheet film. Even 2-3 days would be wonderful for me. The neighborhood during daylight hours has a lot of working people and commercial traffic around, and is on a well-used major street, so appears to be safer than much of west Oakland. Plenty of adjacent street parking. And it's nice to see the sheer volume of film they are handling. Not a lot of 8x10, but obviously substantial quantities of 4X5 and 120 film. They also process B&W films for those without darkrooms. There's a dealer in SF that still tries to keep 8x10 color films in stock, including E6 Ektachrome, which I no longer shoot myself. So something is going on.

And it's pretty obvious that real film as well as RA4 printing is doing just fine in this part of the world, which also happens to have an enormous economy. If California were a nation instead of a State, it would have the 5th largest economy in the world by itself, now exceeding even Germany. And given the fact this is also the tech epicenter of the world, it shows that there must be a lot of digital techies too who prefer to shoot film when they can. I already knew that; plenty of them have told me so. Why would they want to do the same kind of imagery on their recreational free time which they're forced to do during the work week. Yeah, few of them have darkrooms and need to output inkjet or whatever. So they order scans too. But classic cameras and film itself are considered cool amidst that crowd. And there are also evidently quite a few pros still using sheet film, at least on occasions.