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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."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujhdf9_IO4w
But Mama don't take my Velvia away!
I don't care why you're posting AC
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.
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
Kodachrome was like smoking pot.
Fuji is like doing acid.
Agfa is like a rainy day...
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Like all other technologies, its not the features, its what you do with them. I've taken good pictures and some Interesting things with my $600 Canon digital rebel xti. I recently bought a cheap $33 remote timer made by a Hong Kong company so that I can do more time lapse stuff. You don't need to spend a lot, you just need to be innovative. $2000 won't buy you that.
Another sign that digital cameras are slowly phasing out analog
this is not a sign of anything. the article is being used by the submitter in an attempt to prove a point that he wants to make. in fact, if you read the entire article the assertion of the summary is clearly not supported. this film is hard to develop and there is only one lab in the US that does so. it also is among the worst-selling film that Kodak makes:
Kodachrome accounted for less than 1 percent of the company's total sales of still-picture films
so the story here is that Kodak got rid of the bottom selling film of their line. companies do that all the time, and this has nothing to do with digital cameras. film is still sold pervasively and easy developed at dozens of establishments in most towns.
"At least the analog photography industry knows how to change with the times."
Oh yes Kodak have really coped well in the digital age.
Its not like Kodak concluded a four-year, $3.4 billion restructuring in December 2007 that eliminated 28,000 jobs, about half its workforce. Or that its "share price sank to the lowest price in at least 35 years".
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?
I see replies about the death of film, when this was less than 1% of Kodaks film sales per year. Kodachrome is difficult to process, expensive to maintain the equipment for, and has been slowly being phased out for over 50 years, ever since the killing of it in the large format. What the people here do tend to ignore is that for the death of 1 stock, Kodak has introduced new stocks, such as the Ektar 1 and E100D, that truely are visual marvels, cheaper to process and maintain, and most of all, can be upgraded to newer speeds/processes far cheaper than the now almost 80 year old Kodachrome technology. I do think Kodak has made a lot of mis-steps for Film, and I will miss Kodachrome, but I do not call this a mistake in the least.
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I seriously doubt that. Unless they've been stored in sub-zero conditions, I guarantee you that your film has faded over the last twenty years. I suggest you read Henry Wilhelm's "The Permanence and Care of Color Photographs", the definitive work on traditional photographic permanence.
And the book is available for free download here: http://www.wilhelm-research.com/book_toc.html
Kodachrome is the only slide film not prone to color shifting.
When they removed the slow K-14 films from their line I bout 2 cases and popped them in the freezer.
Guess I'll have to use them in short order lest the chemistry goes away too :(
I still have 4 rolls of Konica SRG-3200 in deep freeze. I'm saving that for a special need.
It's the only 3200 film ever made that can see IR through UV, and it was in color.
-nB
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Polaroid is trying to bring back the instant photo, in the form of a small digital camera/printer that can instantly print your digital photo. Sounds pretty cool actually! Polaroid Pogo
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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.
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Like all other technologies, its not the features, its what you do with them. I've taken good pictures and some Interesting things with my $600 Canon digital rebel xti.
Amen to that. We paid a professional photographer $1600 to cover our wedding... but a couple of my favorite pictures were taken by my cousin with a free disposable camera. They're all about the timing and the framing (and catching the photographer ordering us around ;-).
Don't you wish your girlfriend was a geek like me?
"digital cameras are slowly phasing out analog"
I would argue that the transition from analog to digital was actually remarkably quick. The last analog camera I bought was in 2000, I think. Also, cell phones and small point and shoots effectively replaced disposable cameras years ago.
My guess is the only people who used film after 2005 are *some* professionals and artists.
You're probably not going to get RAW mode in any compact in that price range... Not with stock firmware, anyway. The first compact that comes to mind with RAW mode is the Canon G10 and its predecessor, the G9.
Alternatively most of the PowerShot and Ixus range can run CHDK, which adds RAW mode, a live histogram, and a few other really neat toys to the Canon firmware.
URL for the latter is: http://chdk.wikia.com/wiki/CHDK
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Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
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.
Kodachrome was killed by Fuji's Velvia and Kodak's own Ektachrome E100-series professional films years ago. They're both much easier to process (cheaper and more environmentally friendly), as archival, and provide a variety of color palettes to choose from. K64 was around for nostalgia, and nostalgia kept people buying it and Dwayne's processing it for many years beyond what made economic sense.
Polaroid "died" within the past year, moron, not long ago, and there's a group trying to resuscitate it. Polaroid sheet film is not equalled by anything in the digi-toy world, especially type 55.
If you want to know how long Kodak will keep a product going, they discontinued their last dry plate film in 2002. That's an emulsion on a glass plate, a technology that Kodak introduced in 1879 (replacing the wet plate technology, look it up). A flexible transparent base for film was introduced in 1899, meaning they kept the "outdated" glass plate technology going for 103 years after its replacement came along.
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.
There is nothing just like Kodachrome. It has virtually no grain and last almost forever. Certainly longer than Ektachrome.
For anyone who worked with film it is a sad day.
By the way if you want archival quality photos by far the best is black and white film developed and printed. If it is properly
washed and stored, short of burning, it will last forever.
This has to be one of the most ignorant postings I've seen on Slashdot, ever. Good job, eldavojohn. 1. Kodachrome being discontinue is not related to "the death of film." Kodachrome was long supplanted by Fujichrome Velvia as the professional colour-positive film back in the 1990s. 2. Polaroid was not phased out "a long time ago." The company only announced it was getting ending production in February 2008.
There is still a little Kodachrome film out there. I just ordered two rolls to burn on nothing but summer fun. Kodachrome is about fun, and colors, and about wasting film on silly things. I think the significance of this film is years of smiles and of silly pictures that mean the world the people that snapped them. This film reminds us of memories locked in our brains, and when we see one of these pictures the brain unlocks those memories from years past. The colors and the feeling this film captures will never be completely reproduced and could never be replaced. Just like our memories. My advice, buy a roll or two and go have fun with it. Take pictures of friends and family on a trip or whatever. You won't regret it.
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.
Most slashdot readers are probably not aware of what Kodachrome is, which is necessary to understand in order to see why Kodak is discontinuing it.
Kodachrome uses chemical technology that is essentially unchanged from the 1930s. Instead of embedded dye in the film emulsion, as is done in all other color films in use today, the film is essentially black and white, with filter layers, and the dyes are added during processing. Further complicating processing is a requirement for exposure to light of particular colors and intensities between chemical baths. Because of the complicated processing and the tight coupling between the nature of the film and the details of the processing steps, there has been no change to the Kodachrome technology since the introduction of the rarely-used higher speed Kodachrome in the early 1970s.
Meanwhile, competing slide films (Velvia, metioned upthread, also Kodak's older Ektachrome and more recent Lumiere and E100VS series films) continued to improve at least through the late 1990s. In addition to processing easy enough that it can be done in a home lab, these films are higher speed, higher resolution, less grainy, and offer more saturated colors. Continued production of Kodachrome (or, more likely, continued release of emulsions that have been in climate controlled storage for many years) has mainly served a tiny niche of photographers who have built a personal style around the film, plus a few curious newcomers.
Aside from the aforementioned "personal photographic style" considerations, Kodachrome has been practically obsolete for around 30 years, because starting around 1975 or so the last of the serious problems with E-6 process films (Ektachrome etc) -- stability during lengthy archival storage and shadow detail -- were solved.
The presence of good alternatives in other transparency films makes this a non-event. Should we see the day when transparency film is categorically unavailable, that will be an occasion for much greater wailing and gnashing of teeth.
Kodak bustes it's own @$$ long ago with the invention of the digital photo, it's business model didn't change as fast as the industry and that's why they have to close portions of their products, out of the bankrupcy.
Make no mistake, this is no "we are changing with the times", this is "we ran out of business and we are shrinking".
Actually, yeah, it really does. Data is either represented as discrete numerical values (digital) or as a continuous spectrum of values (analog). I can't really think of any form of data storage that doesn't qualify as one or the other. The mere fact that the continuous range is caused by a chemical process and not an electrical process does not mean it isn't analog.
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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.
No, Kodachrome is a slide film, one of the first, and by far the most popular until Velvia came along. Ektachrome in the 60/70/80 s a very crappy second-rate alternative.
I beleive you are talking about Kodacolor - the original name for the Kodak color print film.
Until about mid-90's, just about every professional color photo you ever saw was taken on Kodachrome, Nat. Geographic being a notable user. It's still superior to most of the alternatives as far as raw image quality goes. the other posters have it right - the processing was so obscure and arcane that the turn around time to get it processed has been about 2 weeks, basically forever, compared to every other slide film (Process E6, Ektachrome, Velvia, etc..) which can be done overnight, and to Kodacolor and other print film (that can be done in an hour). Slide film is still a primary medium, print film was strictly for casual point-and-shoot but has been replaced by digital almost entirely.
Brett
Thats just nonsense. It's will be a *very long time* before the pixels on a digital camera approach the size of a silver halide molecule. Most high-quality photography is still done on large-format film stock (Fuji Velvia or similar, in 6x7 of 4x5) which is then scanned to get a digital file. I routinely use Velvia in 2 1/4", scan it, and turn my $75 Yashica-Mat into a 55 MP digital camera. Side by side with my Nikon D90, there's no comparison in the image quality for appropriate subjects.
Brett
My canon point+shoot digitla is great and I still carry it, but it's rare that I take the time to get a good photo, they are mostly snapshots. I now have a cheap 6x6 TLR that shoots on roll film. There's something about the 6x6 film format, with all its impracticality, that helps me enjoy the moment of shooting the picture and enjoy the resulting photo more. Even if I still am a lousy photographer.
Nullius in verba
The mere fact that the continuous range is caused by a chemical process and not an electrical process does not mean it isn't analog.
Are you sure that's why they said it? You're aware that individual grains within a photograph are either "exposed" or "unexposed", right?
Of course, the grain size and shape can vary continuously within certain ranges, as can the positioning. But it's not as (cough) black and white as you seem to think.
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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.
Are you sure you understand silver-halide exposure? You're aware that individual grains are NOT either "exposed" or "unexposed". Instead, a certain number of silver nuclei in each crystal (or grain) will be present depending on how many photons the grain was exposed to. Developing helps amplify the effect, causing more of the grain to be "exposed", but by no means is it "all" or "none". Read about the chemistry of film here. In short, though, it's pretty darn analog.
Film still beats digital in low-light, high-ISO situations. If you just snap pix with your phone, you won't care. If you make a living with your camers, you will.
Yes, the very best digital cameras are very good, but their film equivalents are significantly cheaper.
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It's will be a *very long time* before the pixels on a digital camera approach the size of a silver halide molecule.
It's not a silver halide molecule, it's a silver halide *grain*. The exposed/not exposed distinction is based on entire grains, not single silver atoms. The effective distance between grains on normal filmstock is going to be in the 1-10 micron range. For a 35mm negative, that's about 12 megapixels to 1,225 megapixels. A caveat, however, is that grains are binary - exposed or unexposed, whereas a digital camera pixel has multiple levels. If we go with 256 shades of gray, your 35 mm negative is more like a sub-megapixel to a 5 megapixel camera. (If we assume each "pixel" denotes a region where anywhere from 0-255 grains are exposed.) Of course, the effective resolution is a bit higher than this, as we can have situations where there is sub-pixel patterning, or if we use more limited pixel resolution (say 40 gray levels, versus 256).
The other issue is that since the grains are scattered randomly, and not laid out on a grid, the film negative will degrade more gracefully when enlarged. It won't show the pixelation artifacts, but don't be fooled into thinking that you're creating any more information. I don't know the grain size of the Velvia you're using, but assuming it's 3 microns, a 2 1/4" square negative contains only about 3.3 billion grains. Scanning for 55 megapixels makes sense if you're interested in the sub-pixel patterning, but don't be fooled into thinking you're getting the full 14 billion grain equivalent that a 55 megapixel 256 level greyscale digital capture would give you.
You are confusing Kodachrome (chome == transparency in Kodak) with Kodacolor. Kodachrome was indeed the film of choice for many baby boomer slideshows. Before Ektachrome came along it was the only choice. It was also used for home movies. For instance the Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination was shot in Kodachrome.
Yes but grains there are, so a silver halide image can never be a seamless continuum of hue and brightness.
No matter how good the grains are, there are still a (very) finite number of them.
Seems we need a better definition of analogue.
No, your children are not the special ones. Nor are your pets.
By your definition, no physical medium is analogue. After all, they're all made up of molecules and atoms, and other sub-atomic particles. Electricity (and electric devices) couldn't be analogue, among other things, the electron count is discrete.
Facebook there's enough pics for any future historian.
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We don't know how this society of babbling idiots survived, but they managed to eke out some kind of meaningless existence until the Armed Grammarian Uprising of 2057, when order was restored.
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You could encode information in the "position" of the atoms. That would make the information analog (i.e., there is an infinite number of positions you can put an atom in, afaik).
Nope.
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