Despite the huge growth in digital photography over the past few years it's a surprise there's that many of these places left (akin to mobile phones and BT phone kiosks). However, printing at home is only occasionally successful, unless you carry it out in a professional context and is often expensive. Therefore places like Max Spielman can provide a value for money service should you wish to print out your myriad digi snaps. The world we live in has never been so visually documented as our current age, with every nook and cranny preserved (unless a crazy electro magnetic wave of energy wipes clean the worlds servers, hard drives and iBerry Text Phones - et al) for future historians to unravel our dirty laundry and look into our strange, repetitive behaviour.
My neighbour, fairly averse to technology recently acquired his first digital camera. With no computer to check the pictures from his worldly travels he can now take in his 'SD card' or indeed whole camera and download the contents onto their printing machine. If you don't mind waiting a couple of days and you have quite a lot to print off, you can get a really decent price for your pictures (a tenner for 200 prints must be far, far cheaper than printing at home).
I still use this shop because even though I use a digi cam, the quality is just nothing like the quality I can get on my 35mm SLR: therefore I can still (thankfully) take in my 35mm film to be printed off (within an hour if you're willing to pay a premium). A digital SLR is on my ever pulsating wish list.
Aside from usual prints you can also purchase camera's, memory cards, picture frames and other associated photo paraphernalia.
The service is really friendly and helpful. For the best part however my (35mm) prints seem to be a little disappointing quality wise: if you were to be further up the professional chain then I'd recommend looking at the more pro shops or get in touch with somebody with dark room facilities. read more