There are four main photography stores in Madison that I know of. These are: Ritz One-hour photo, The Camera Company, Star Photo, and Photoart-house and Hobby. There is also Photo Express, but since they mainly only do processing and Portraits, I will not review them here.

1)Ritz Camera is a nation wide chain of photo stores (with over 1300 locations). They are generally friendly and there stores are mostly set up very similar (they have locations in both East Town and West Town malls). There prices are generally fairly good, around msrp, although sometimes a little lower. If you are a more advanced shooter, though, this is not he place to go. They only carry the high end equipment at the bigger stores (i.e. mall of america) and you can often find better prices on the internet or at other stores.

2) Star Photo (can't find a website) has a couple of locations exclusivley in Madison, although there are many other stores called Star Photo in other cities. You step in this store and you immediately smell the saturation of developer in the air (I love that smell!). At this store, they are very professional and will do there best to get you what you want. They do in-house E-6, C-41, and other peocessing, as well as picture cds, this was part of my problem with them. I gave them three roles of E-6 (slide) film and asked for photo cd's. I knew that they would probably have to be sent out because they only do picture cd's in house (a picture cd is different from photo cd in that picture cd's have a 1.5MP resolution and are stored as jpegs (jpeg is a lower quality file format that compreses pictures to a lower size) while photo cd's are 6MP and are stored in Kodak's raw format (no compression)-much higher quality than picture cd's). Unfortunately, they must not have understood me and they gave me the in house slide processing and picture cd. I tried the cd's out and the quality was HORIBLE. I took them back, and fortunately, they are crediting me all that I payed before towards the real photocd's($50!), but I'm still paying $90 to get it done. I could have gotten it a lot cheaper somewhere else.

3)The Camera Company is a nice store that has a few locations in Madison. They are very professional and friendly and will help you out with any camera you need. There prices are quite high, especially for processing, but they do a good job.

4)Photoart House and Hobby. I'm not completely sure they are still in buisness, but they are definately worth mentioning. This is definately my favorite store out of all. They are very friendly with a vast selection of used equipment. My only complaint with them is that it took a long time for my camera to come back when getting it fixed, although this may be partially Olympus' fault, and I have nothing to compare it to either so this is probably not valid.