Hello,
Perhaps I can shed a little light here. I'm in the pro lab business.
The prints from slides services have changed a lot in the last few years. Ilfochrome or "Cibachrome" as most of us knew it as, is indeed a great process, but expensive as previously mentioned and getting hard to find. A good Cibachrome printer (person) is worth his or her weight in gold because it's a tricky process to control. As an inherently contrasty medium, print contrast is also difficult to control therefore requiring masking negatives sandwiched with the slide to adjust contrast. This is one of the reasons for the expense due to the extra labour involved in just preparing it for printing. The other of course is the price of the materials and the cost of maintaining a good chemical activity thru rigorous process monitoring.
What a lot of people don't know is that there are some Ilfochrome labs that actually print digitally on to the same material. Quite simply, the images are scanned, adjusted then printed via lightjet, Lambda, Chromira etc. etc. then run thru the traditional Cibachrome chemical reversal type process. The reason for this approach is the ability to adjust contrast digitally instead of the handstands required for masking negatives, along with the usual abilities to alter images, drop in text etc. and still printed on this unique medium. It's worth mentioning that the glossy material is really sumptuous, really has depth. It's unfortunate that a lot of people have never actually seen one. It's also considered one of the most archival photographic mediums, though that has been disputed. I really don't know the real score on that one.
Colour Chrome Atlanta is one of the most impressive labs I've ever seen. I believe they still do Cibachrome.
http://www.colorchrome.com/index.html
The other "R" process, commonly known as R3 and R3000 etc. was a standardized process common to at least Kodak and Fuji etc. The papers and chemicals could be interchanged from one company to another. Like Ilfochrome, this process had potential but also vulnerable to contrast control issues and was also a challenge to control the chemistry. Any colour reversal process will be. Sharp, rich and downright yummy! Good prints from both these mediums could knock your socks off because the original images were coming from transparencies which are by nature a more dynamic medium than negatives or anything else. I speak in past tense because this process is unfortunately pretty much dead. My catalogue shows the stuff as being either discontinued or special order. That's really unfortunate.
There is still limited usage of internegatives. This is one of the most frustrating and abused processes. Internegative film is a specialized formula to deal with the inherent gain in contrast common to most any copy process. Some cheesy labs would switch with everyday colour film with horrible results, but try to convince the customer that "that's the way it goes with printing slides". WRONG! Indeed internegative film can work well but requires precise balancing of exposure for both intensity and colour balance. The trick is to get all 3 colours to respond similarly to avoid classic cross colouring. Long story. The frustration comes from the unpredictable nature of internegatives. Seems that some slides would come to life, others would fall flat on their face even when things were under control.
Today, the majority of good quality prints from slides are being done digitally. And what a crap shoot this topic can be. The 2 weakest links in the chain are the scanner and the operator. U can bet that a lab that is doing digital Ilfochrome is likely using first rate scanners and first rate operators. It's too expensive a process to do otherwise. I'm sure the same can be said for most reputable pro labs who print with laser, LED or CRT. We print with a CRT printer.
Then there's the digital minilabs. I've seen very mixed results from these machines. The scanners are lightning fast, but it seems the designers didn't spend a lot of time designing them to print from positives.
The most entertaining comes from cheap scanners and inkjet printers. I've seen some pretty good stuff, and some that are wishful thinking at best, but none that could touch the real thing.
So, there are some good choices out there, none of them cheap. Good never comes cheap. Slides / transparencies deserve the highest respect because it's such a stunning, beautiful medium that a lot of us have neglected in a world of over hyped gimmicks. Pop a good tranny in a good projector with a good lens taken with a good camera and you'll wonder what the hell you were thinking. There just ain't nothin like it!!! PS, I'm not talking about shooting for a living or comparing to B&W etc.
Enough babbling
Paul