Kodak To Stop Making Black and White Paper

Swirsky writes "For those of us who remember spending quality time in a dark room with Kodak Rapid RC paper and a bottle of Dektol, here's some bad news - Kodak will stop making black and white photographic paper. Black and white photo work (especially because you can use a safelight!) is a wonderful way of introducing someone to photography. I guess if we want to do it, we'll have to use home-made emulsions on paper. As a pro photographer, I'm bothered by this, though admittedly I haven't done b/w darkroom work in years."

Comments

Who uses kodak B&W paper?

[Jason1729]

Ilford is so much better, and Kodak relying on their band name is more expensive. I still use a few hundred sheets a year of black and white photographic paper and I hadn't even heard about this.

When Ilford stops making paper that will be a sad day. Kodak stoping isn't even newsworthy.

Re:DSLR seems like the only way to go

[jcupitt65]

That can be true for compact point-and-click cameras with tiny 7mm x 5mm sensors, but not for DSLRs. They have much better dynamic range and lower noise than film.

No DSLR uses multiple CDDs (AFAIK). You'll get rather a good B&W by just taking the green channel.

Finally film resolution is always quoted for some tiny contrast ratio (20%? something like that). Digital resolution is at 100% contrast ratio so it can actually look sharper even when the lpi is lower.

If anyone's not seen it, this DSLR vs medium format shootout from a few years ago has some interesting stuff in. Has a film person made a rebuttal? I'd be interested to see.

Re:Who cares ....

[Withershins]

B.S.

As a photographer for 21 years, from 1957 to 1978, where lots of my work came out of a B&W darkroom (and where I did the work with my own little hands), Illford was popular but crap compared to the control one had with Kodak Polycontrast papers (although the Illford filters worked better with Pollycontrast).

I taught photography and darkroom technique as well as working in advertizing, technical and photojournalism photography. Perhaps your pictures were muddy on Kodak paper because you didn't know how to make a good negative. The extra gamma (contrast) of Illford papers was often a crutch for bad photographers.

And the only way to let your photo speak for itself instead of being pseudo art was to use a glossy paper (matte and semi-matte was for the photo clubs) although ferrotyping was silly.

So, now my dream of an exibit of my old work (including the first Woodstock Festival as well as the Vietnam anti-war protests in DC and NYC and Berkeley) in 16x20 and larger is dead?

Re:Digital always win

[Paraplex]

Digital has thus far failed to meet one unavoidable reality.

We observe in analog...

the pixels in a digital image shouldn't be aligned.. they should be slightly random.. the frames in video/computer monitors should be a constant sequence of random photons. Digital audio should be Hi Def and slightly fuzzy and data storage should have a level of redundancy.

Until that is met, purists will continue to dislike the tech.

That said, HDR cameras (http://www.cybergrain.com/tech/hdr/) and HD cameras will revolutionise (even more so) the imaging world.

If I can see a scene, capture it with a single click and later frame it, adjust the colours display it on a high dynamic range monitor, or modify the image so the mountains are as visible as the sun setting behind them, then I say this overcomes a *massive* shortcoming of current and previous cameras.

I don't care for the "art" of technical photography. The real art is in seeing and capturing the images.. the technical side is a clumsy romanticised inconvenience.