As I mentioned earlier, it was in April of 2019 that I produced my first video about QWD lab. I decided that it was time to give a recommendation on my YouTube channel after getting scans back from several rolls of film and being pleased by their quality. I was also happy with the characteristics of Vision 50D and 250D. In the notes of the video, I shared a link to download an unedited TIF file of one of my negatives that was scanned by QWD lab as “proof” of their superior quality.

Unfortunately, many people visited the link on their smartphone. They looked at Google’s pixelated preview rather than using a proper computer, downloading the file, and viewing it in Lightroom or Photoshop. They missed the point. However, many took the time to look and saw the real value. I find it unfortunate that QWD no longer provides film scanning services to film photographers. I had hoped their quality would help push the industry away from JPGs.

A rocky middle

I speculate that challenges for QWD lab probably started around April or May of 2019. I base that speculation on three things: the temporary closure of their website, their decision to stop scanning film for stills photographers and reserve it for motion picture professionals, and their newly extended one to two week timeline for all other business services. Each of those changes happened sometime around April to June of 2019 based on the cookie trail left by my emails and memory. So, do not take that date range as gospel, but it is probably close enough.

As I mentioned at the beginning of the article, on May 12th of 2019 I discovered that QWD’s website was down due to a few commenters on a YouTube video where I suggested their services. At that point, I reached out to a local photographer who had sent film to QWD lab upon my recommendation. He told me that QWD had delayed his film scans for over a week, and he was hoping to receive them soon. However, he had been in contact with Jeremy several times and was not worried about being ghosted. At this point, I took my initial video review down so that no one else would follow my links to a closed website. In hindsight, I would have made a pinned comment suggesting that everyone wait until QWD was back up and running for new orders.

I expected there to be problems with QWD’s plan early on because of their technological limitations and their workforce size. If my memory serves correctly, QWD lab in its earliest stages had either a 48 or 72 hour guaranteed turnaround time for development and scanning on the east coast. That probably worked well in their infancy, but it is possible that their order volume grew faster than expected, and their bottleneck, the speed of their scanning method of choice, was far too narrow. That or they did not have enough warm bodies. QWD experimented with new scanning techniques for stills during their shut down in May, and the resulting 2K and 4K scans were fantastic - especially the color (I received two rolls worth). However, it appears that the method still was not sufficient with their mixture of staff or technology. They decided to stop providing scanning as a standard service to stills shooters in late 2019.

Let’s cross our fingers

Starting a business is hard. Starting a film lab has to be one of the harder business projects out there and a significant gamble if you consider the state of the industry. That is why I am not overly concerned with the hiccups and changes in direction that have occurred for QWD over the last two years. I honestly expected them. Like Ferrania, I give QWD the benefit of the doubt because I have already seen their potential with my own two eyes. I wish QWD lab the best with their operations, and I cannot wait to try out developing with their ECN-2 kit. You can watch my unboxing video of that below. Stay tuned for my livestream in a few weeks when I develop my first few rolls.

Update: You can read my review of their developing kit here!