Why has the quality of 'non-specialist' high-steet printing from the likes of Click/Supasnaps etc etc got so routinely bad? Prints regularly display poor sharpness, hairs and lack of tonal-range particularly in the primary colours (e.g.: they appear to be only able to print one red with little variance in hue or intensity). This seems consistent regardless of what film/D&P is used.

Thankfully, I'm a slide-film user so I'm rarely affected by this. However my wife shoots pretty-much all of her important shots on print-film (we both use digital for 'disposable' shots) and she is at the mercy of a D&P outlet. It's been very obvious that there has been a gradual downslide in printing-quality pretty much since the turn of the century. Does this date coincide with the mass uptake of fully automated digital printing in the commercial sector?

On one occasion the prints were so bad that I marched them back to the shop and asked for reprints. It was obvious that the (non-enthusiast) clerk wasn't really sure what I was dissatisfied with. I can only presume that 36 prints with a very-pronounced blue tint would not have troubled him. To be fair, he did reprint without any quibble and the results were back 'up' to the usual (sub) standard. However, surely the original prints should have been binned at some kind of proofing-stage? Other customers so affected could well have assumed it was a fault of their camera.

There's hardly any point in using half-decent equipment any more: looking at the prints, my wife's Nikon F65 barely betters the output from a cheap Ł50 P&S zoom. It's frustrating that so much more detail and gradiation is locked away in the negs that the poor printing-process is not revealing. Sadly to D&P at home is not really an option.