Never judge cameras on the basis of commercial prints!

(Relatively unmanipulated straight scans from my low-cost scanner)

Example 1:
The pictures on the left (above and below) were printed at Costco in Prescott, Arizona. The prints at right were printed by Bonusprint in the UK - these are prints from the same negative! Machine prints of flash pictures can be worse than this. Even if your exposure is correct (say you did a manual flash, or metered it with a separate flash meter), the machine will go ahead and make the exposure mistake anyway. They often work on average tonality with no manual inputs whatever, and if, for example, your subject is in a dark room, with no nearby background, perhaps wearing dark clothing, then that subject's face might well be printed as a white blob, even though the film is exposed correctly. The same thing happens when you've compensated for backlighting, yet the print is printed based on the background exposure anyway, despite all your careful efforts.

(These GR10 pics show the wrong date after replacing the battery - something to watch out for.)

Example 2:

Had these prints been from different makes of film, it would have been easy to blame the differences on that; but over the years I've noticed very little difference between film brands (judging from prints from UK photofinishers).

Bonusprint's printing equipment automatically balances out contrast within prints, and while these are the most extreme examples we had (that I was able to scan), subtler differences in others we had reprinted nevertheless made the additional expenditure worthwhile.

For most of these prints from Arizona and Utah exposures were carefully done by holding readings from mid-tones (using Spot, or Infinity or Snap modes), which should have eliminated any adverse effects from large, bright areas of sky. But, of course, the way automatic printing machines work, basing exposures on average densities, the machines didn't know we did all that careful exposing and went ahead and undid all our careful precautions, making exactly the same mistakes we were trying to avoid.

While machines with human operators should be generally better than purely automatic ones, Bonusprint's fully automated digitally enhanced printing machines use sophisticated built-in contrast-control to achieve the same end. (Follow the link to the Bonusprint home page, then click "Film Processing" and "Digitally Enhanced" to see their Agfa Dimax printing equipment and descriptions of the processes and results.) Incidentally, we aren't connected to Bonusprint in any way, nor are they perfect. Their colors often tend to be too yellow-green and prints sometimes too pale and anemic-looking, lacking the richness of color we've seen from some processors in the US. The rocks and soil in their two prints above are really a deep red, not yellowish brown as depicted.

Here's what they say:

The machines Bonusprint use are very good at printing photos made using direct flash, especially when there are dark backgrounds. Ordinary photo printing machines invariably stumble when there is a tiny face or two illuminated by flash, surrounded by a large area of dark background - they automatically use the average density and end up printing the backgrounds lighter than they really were, burning out the faces in the process. I've seen innumerable camera reviews on the internet where cameras were rejected or downrated on the basis of over-exposing flash, or "too much contrast," or pictures "too dark," or other such nit-picking. As these examples illustrate the huge range of possibilities from just two different photofinishers, a lot of those downrated cameras could be better than their owners (and the readers of their reviews) ever thought!

Also, never judge a camera's lens from enprints. They may have been printed by a small machine built primarily for processing film from typical snapshot and disposable cameras. Look at a typical mini-lab setup - you can guess that the chemistry inside them is, well, overworked, to put it politely. I once read a critique of British photofinishers that told how they cut costs by using the chemistry at the highest possible dilutions, and keep it for as long as they can, which means our poor negatives start out very badly developed, and then yield bland prints lacking in sharpness and detail in both highlights and shadows as well as richness of color.

(If anything is pushing people toward digital photography, I reckon it's poor quality photofinishing. I don't do slides. My old monochrome darkroom has been retired, but it's easy to see how a negative scanner combined with a good photo-quality printer might be an alternative to a digital camera.)