Labs and Shops in Hamburg, Germany

This page will be only of local interest. If you happen to live in Hamburg and look for a decent lab for processing your films, you might find this information helpful. These are the shops I have experience with:

Foto Partner Strasser -- this is the company where I usually go to if I need something. They have an own lab and produce the best prints I've ever seen. It's the first lab which delivers results I'm always totaly happy with. Just order Laser Prints and you will know what I'm talking about. The quality, sharpness and colour saturation of those prints is outstanding and show you what your equipment is able to do. Yes, these digital prints are expensive, almost twice as expensive as prints of the same size from other labs. But come on, I don't spend so much money on Zeiss glass and then go to a lab which delivers mediocre results!

There is one thing I'm not totaly happy with. If you order Laser Prints, they offer to store the scans for only 1,99 EUR on a Photo CD. This is not the Kodak Photo CD format but the format their Fuji Digital Printer uses. I expected the jpeg files on this CD to be as good as the Laser Prints, but for some unexplained reason the colours aren't really that saturated and the contrast could also be better in my opinion. Here is an example in 1:1 magnification:

As you can see, there seems to be some 'noise' (especially in the green background) which miraculously doesn't show up on the prints! It is not the grain of the film, although this picture was taken with an ISO 400 film. I wonder if this is just something typical of the digitalization process. I saw the same effect in John Shaw's book 'Closeups in Nature' (not that I would ever dare to compare my macro pictures to his!), and Shaw usually uses Kodacrome 25, so there shouldn't be any visible grain. As you can see, the sharpness of the scans is quite okay. Oh, by the way, the pixel size of the jpegs will depend on the size of the prints (e.g. 10x15cm or 13x18cm) you order, as they choose a resolution for the scans which matches the output format!

Foto Partner also has a huge selection of used equipment. They give you one year warranty on used equipment. Even with new equipment they are almost always cheaper than the recommended retail price. I was always pleased with what I bought there. (BTW: There is a list of used equipment on their web page, but this list never seems to be up to date. Better go to their main shop in the EKZ Hamburger Strasse!)

They are competent, fair and friendly. I can highly recommend them.

PPS -- they call themselfs 'Professional Photo Service' and they try to behave like that, which means that they treat you like a piece of shit if you don't at least show up with a Canon EOS-1V or a Nikon F5. It is really unbelievable! If they were only competent enough, this behaviour might be tolerable, but I didn't get this impression. If I'm interested in a product I'm usually very well informed when I walk into a shop and ask if I could please have a look at this thing. I then always knew much more about it than the little arrogant 'professional' on the other side of the counter. Hell, I already forgot more about the physics behind light and optics than this clown will probably ever know in his whole life! You may ask why I list this company here at all. Well, they seem to buy large quantities and I got some new Canon equipment there considerably below the list price. But even if I took advantage of them I always found interacting with them being an unpleasant experience.

Wiesenhavern -- for quite some time I handed in my films at their lab. The prices were okay and the quality I got for these prices was probably also more or less acceptable. At least most of the time. But the results were never reproduceable. For example I tried to find out what they can handle better, Kodak or Fuji material. Several times I handed in some Fuji and Kodak films, exposed on the same day under exactly the same conditions. When I got back the prints I could always clearly see the difference between the two film brands (really!), but sometimes the Kodak films gave better results than the Fuji films and perhaps a week later it was just the other way around! Then some day I got back prints with noticable bad contrast; I complained and they sent them back to the lab. The lab printed them again and I got back the best prints I've seen yet from that lab. In fact I was surprised how good the prints looked this time. So that was the difference between just printing them automatically with a machine which eats film canisters on one side and s[p/h]its out prints on the other side without anybody paying any attention and prints where actually somebody looked if they were reasonable. Now, after I knew what they can do, I became much more picky. I looked at the prints just when I got them back and if I was not satisfied (which by now was most of the time), I asked them to print them again. And guess what: everytime I sent them back to the lab, I got much better quality on the second try. As you might imagine, business relations started to become cumbersome sooner or later... Finally I changed the lab and went to Foto Partner Strasser (see above). It was a good decision. The quality of their prints is better by orders of magnitude and they are only about twice as expensive.

I never bought any equipment at Wiesenhavern. They were always too expensive. Whenever I asked for the price of a lens or flash unit or camera body, they just stated the normal list price. But they also offered that they will reduce their price if I find a shop in Hamburg which is cheaper and then sell the stuff to me for the same price (they call it 'Tiefstpreisgarantie'). As I find this behaviour economically unfair, I always buy at the shop which offers to me the best price and conditions in the first place. Sometimes they even try to sell to you outdated equipment for the original list price, even if a new model is already on the market (sometimes for years!). For example, when I was looking for the Canon 100mm Macro lens they offered to me the old, non-USM version (which Canon replaced by a much nicer, internal focussing USM lens years ago!) for the same price as the new USM version of this lens.

Photo Dose -- with this lab my experiences are mixed. If you hand in films for processing and prints (as an 'Erstbestellung') you will get back probably the worst quality you've ever seen, so better don't do that. The results are really totaly unacceptable. But sometimes they have special offers for larger prints and whenever I gave some negatives to them ('Nachbestellung')  to make A4 and even A3 sized prints the quality was more or less okay. They offer to make a Photo CD (not a Kodak Photo CD!) of your pictures. I ordered this once. If you still happen to have one of these old hand scanners we used to use ten years ago: better digitize your photos with this device, it will outdo the quality of their scans by far. Actually I thought this must be an error, so I sent the Photo CD back to the lab. They told me that this quality is all I can expect and that this is the reason why it is so cheap.

They offer the lowest price for black and white prints on real black and white paper of all the labs listed here. I cannot really compare, but I think the quality is only average.

Photo Dose has a huge list of 2nd hand equipment on the web, but I have no experience with buying stuff there.

Saturn -- they apparently buy such large quantities that you see there new Hasselblads, Rolleis and Leicas sometimes up to 30 - 40% below the official list price! Even if they put on something the list price tag, it's worth asking. I almost always got a reduction, in one case even more than I asked for!

Films and especially batteries are cheap there and if you buy slide film you get the processing for free. Until end of 2003 they used to have a contract with a Kodak lab which delivered very good quality. From January 1st 2004 they send films for processing to a different lab which is not as good as the Kodak lab but still more or less okay. The Kodak lab had the advantage that scans were fine for web use if you ordered a Picture CD. The new lab doesn't deliver scans of this quality and it is a waste of money to pay 5 EUR for low resultion scans with bad density adjustment.

The quality of slides was always okay.

-- Markus Ehrenfried