Defective disposable cameras and badly respooled film rolls cause issues at film labs and ruin images.
Fujifilm issued a statement to labs about an offending product that may produce unusable images and even damage the minilab machines. There’s also a growing number of posts on social media by lab technicians sharing various problems with rolls and disposables.
Some of those posts suggest that Kodak’s recent rule-tightening about sales of Vision 3 film (see: analog.cafe/comments/up67) may be related to the rise of improper processing and respooling of that film.
The deffective products aren’t necessarily cheaper than quality film but they are always disappointing to the photographers who use them and are upsetting to the lab technicians who have to deal with the fallout while seeing their potential customers get discouraged about film altogether.
The camera in the photo is an example of a product most labs won’t accept (thanks to Fujifilm’s statement, aparently sent to their minilab machine owners). It’s possible that some technicians may be discouraged from processing any product the brand which they do not recognize.
A post by Norwich Camera on Threads showed a particularly sinister Temu product with a few short film ends fastened by tape. These could all be different films; the frames where the tape appears are 100% ruined.
Worse, one could hide a piece of film with remjet inside the canister and no remjet that sticks outside the canister — which could cause the lab to ruin its batch of chemicals and all the films that were developed in that batch. (Thankfully, that doesn’t seem to have been the case here).
Dmitri Dec 26, ‘24
Dmitri Dec 26, ‘24