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Kodak Kills Kodachrome
eldavojohn writes "Another sign that digital cameras are slowly phasing out analog comes with Kodak's announcement to discontinue Kodachrome film. This should come as no surprise as Polaroid film was phased out long ago. At least the analog photography industry knows how to change with the times."
I think what will be the big irony of the digital revolution is that we haven't tackled the technological problems yet like getting people to back things up and store them for long periods of time. One might think that with the advent of digital that in 100 years we'll have pictures of virtually everything from this era, but because of the problems people face, we will probably yet again have a gapping hole in time filled with lost pictures.
If I was a high-school kid trying to get into photography, a decent SLR was about $500 and if you knew enough, you could make great photos with it. Now, a full-size dSLR is at least $2k.
Kodachrome
They give us those nice bright colors
They give us the greens of summers
Makes you think all the world's a sunny day, oh yeah
I got a Nikon camera
I love to take a photograph
So mama don't take my Kodachrome away
What is the digital equivalent of the Pentax K1000? For those who don't know, the K1000 was *the* student SLR for the last 25 years of the film era. Everybody had one.
So what do introductory-level photography students use nowadays?
No, the Wikipedia article does not say Velvia was discontinued. It says that the original type of Velvia (RVP) was discontinued. However, new lines of Velvia are still going strong. In fact, Velvia and Provia are typically still the film of choice among professionals still shooting film.
Using any digital process you'd like, make a slide that doesn't stand out as "fake" in a set of either Kodachrome-25 or Kodachrome-64 slides.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
What is a BBB Accredited Business?, emphasis mine.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
Not even Kodak processes it actually. They contract out to the one lab left in the country that develops Kodachrome. And the contract runs out in 2010.
That's like saying that the buggy whip industry knew how to change with the times.
What they know is that Kodachrome isn't selling as well as it used to, therefore it's not worthwhile for them to manufacture it any more. It's not due to any extreme cleverness or long term strategic planning on their part.
This is basically the same way that Intel got out of the DRAM business. If you read Grove's book Only the Paranoid Survive, he describes how Intel avoided losing their shirts in the DRAM wars not by being extremely clever in forseeing that the DRAM market was going to become brutally competitive, but by their standard business planning based on costs of wafer starts and profits of various kinds of products. When DRAM became less profitable, fewer wafer starts were allocated to DRAM and more allocated to other products, eventually to the point that they were making almost no DRAM. They realized what had happened AFTER the fact.
perfect color, contrast and detail. the look was rich, the colors fat. slow yes but the best 35mm film i ever shot. my slides from the seventies still look gorgeous. i will miss this film, the clack of the projector loading a new image and the smoke drifting through the light.
Intel phases out Pentium II for Pentium III ! This is the death of processors!
Not a good comparison, you can't say the new thing that is the same thing as the old thing indicates the death of the old thing, because paradoxically you would be inferring that the new thing is death to things like the new thing, which is like the old thing, but not the old thing, its the same thing - but better.
You need things that fulfill the same role but are a different technology entirely.
DVD vs. VHS
Automobile vs. Horse drawn buggy
Implants vs. Tissue Paper
"There are no facts, only interpretations." --Friedrich Nietzsche.
I never really thought I'd be so saddened by the loss of any film stock, but I reconnected with Kodachrome through a massive effort to scan over a thousand slides from my family's life in 2008 - 75% of which were Kodachrome.
The two most beautiful pictures of myself and my sister were made on 35mm Kodachrome using my father's Pentax K1000.
30-something years later I made a picture of my Mum and the image felt dreamy and at the same time the level of detail was unflinching. I wish I had used the whole roll making pictures of my family.
Perhaps I'll use those last three rolls in my fridge for pictures of people I love. A fitting end to this way of interpreting the world.
The Kodachrome look now firmly passes into the realm of nostalgia.
was that 'compact optical disk' refreshed continuously, with a secondary copy in case of corruption of the first?
if so, then I dare say the picture on that disk is going to be better than your Kodachrome slide.
media deteriorates, whether we like it or not. That goes for negatives and photographic prints just as well as for 'digital media'. negatives and prints, in our eyes, deteriorate gracefully.. that is to say that if the colors fade a little, that's okay.. we can still see the overall picture. Whereas a flipped bit in a JPEG can be disastrous (a good reason not to use JPEG for archival storage of digital pictures, but see the above anyway).
On the other hand.. that faded picture is forever faded.. you're not going to get the original back, ever. You can scan it (hey look, now it's digital.. lol?) and then fix it in post and then.. make another print of it (hey look, your digital photo is now a print.. imagine that, I guess you can have the best of both worlds if you want, with digital), but it won't be the original anymore.
With digital, however, you'll always have that original. Short of disastrous corruption on both the original -and- the backup (and possibly a third backup, etc.), or somehow losing the means to read all the backup media entirely, you'll always have that original and nothing is ever lost unless you -let it- be lost.
Again.. you don't get that choice with film negatives and prints. There's nothing you can do to preserve the prints in original state - not even sealing it in vacuum light-blocking chamber.
You stated in another post up above that nobody's solved the digital archiving problem yet. That's simply not true - we have, years ago; the only issue is that it seems like it's more work (making backups, keeping up with next-gen storage, etc.) to do so. With negatives and prints, you can be relatively lazy about it, knowing full-well that in 20 years that photo might have faded a bit, and not giving a damn simply because it's a more graceful degradation. But really, that's when somebody's kidding themselves about the medium of choice and how serious they are about archiving.
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On a side-note.. I believe there was an article not too long ago on Slashdot about researching being able to zap a metal with a laser for some stupendously short amount of time and essentially make it change colors. Suppose you did that with, say, Platinum.. that could be one heck of an archival medium, then.. although the picture would look oddly metallic and shiny :)
My family's house did burn down while I was in high school, with two younger siblings. Many photos were lost. Some, forever. Most are back, however, including photos of my childhood and that of my parents. Over the years, we had exchanged photos with our family. After we were settled and life had returned to normal, everyone returned pictures. We even got some new ones I'd never seen before.
Digitize your photos, if you like. Don't forget to grab all your thumb drives as you're evacuating, or have them stored remotely and/or online, if you like. Whatever you choose.
My only purpose in commenting was to share the experience I had of witnessing how my family's cultural/social interaction had provided for off-site data recovery. I don't know if anyone was trading pictures for a reason, but it worked out nicely. The lesson is applicable to digital photos as well: off-site backup! The medium isn't nearly as important as the practice.
as many have already pointed out Kodachrome has been replaced by better film ... thats the real story here it has nothing to do with dropping film for digital... kodak has just released Ektar and the take up has been big. Fuji just re-released Velvia in ISO50 ...
If film is nolonger cost effective why have Kodak spend so much R&D money on Ektar ?
There is a film revival happeing at the moment as professionals and serious amateurs return to film, for many reasons.
Bah! Ektachrome is a cheap substitute for Kodachrome. Literally. It was introduced as a cheaper film that was easier to develop, and which allowed fast shutter speeds in low light. Kodachrome, on the other hand, has always been for people who wanted the best quality possible, and wanted the images to last. Affordable digital sensors are still not equal to Kodachrome in dynamic range or in detail. A Kodachrome slide kept in optimal conditions will last nearly 200 years with only slight color degradation. By contrast, you will have to backup your backups and then get your grandchildren to backup those backups for their grandchildren to backup, for them to be able to view those digital images at all. Yeah, I understand that the market has abandoned Kodachrome and why. But the market is a damn fool.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
??????
Seriously, i am not sure what you are talking about...
Film has _some_ advantages, i will admit it. But low-light performance is NOT one of them.
In fact, it is telling that the area where you need best low light performance was the first to switch to CCDs (Astronomy).
Modern pro-DSRL can make pictures at ISO 12800 and higher, with reasonable noise levels (consumer DSRL can still do 800 or 1600 without looking too crappy).
Any film that would try to match that would look like a nice case of modern art, and not a photograph.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
Sadly Kodachrome 64 was the last really archival slide file with the finest grain suitable for stereo photography. Ektachrome color fades. Fugichome has a cold garish feel. Digital might take hi-res images but there still is no real efficient compacted viewing device like a hand held viewer looking at 2 slides with a light. Successful 3-D photography is all about the crispness of details. Grain tends to take you out of the experience.
Steve
Kodachrome uses a process somewhat similar to 3 strip Technicolor. Without a doubt, no other slide film renders colors in such lovely saturation and balance. Like Technicolor, Kodachrome is better than real life. No other still film renders such vibrant reds, something at which the Ektachrome stock fails miserably. Instead of the vibrant reds, deep blues, and fine grain of Kodachrome, the Ektachrome film only provides greenish hued, grainy, pastel colors in comparison.
And in archival terms, no other widely available still film color stock is as stable and long lasting. Long after the last Ektachrome has faded into flamingo shades of pink pastel, Kodachrome colors will remain almost as vibrant as the day it first left the processing lab.