Kodak Is Bringing Back Ektachrome Film (petapixel.com)

sandbagger writes: Kodak, the film stock maker, is bringing back the Ektachrome film stock that was the popular alternative to its other product, Kodachrome. The Ektachrome is more sensitive to the cool side of the spectrum as opposed to the warmer Kodachrome. Apparently the product will be back on shelves later this year. âoeThe reintroduction of one of the most iconic films is supported by the growing popularity of analog photography and a resurgence in shooting film,â Kodak Alaris says. âoeResurgence in the popularity of analog photography has created demand for new and old film products alike. Sales of professional photographic films have been steadily rising over the last few years, with professionals and enthusiasts rediscovering the artistic control offered by manual processes and the creative satisfaction of a physical end product.â

Comments

Not so fast

[tietokone-olmi]

Says Q4, 2017 in there...

Re: Not so fast

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone who knows anything about photography will cheer this development and pray for the return also of the classic.b&w films. The control in the latter both in exposure, development and final print process cannot be matched by any digital process. If in doubt visit any art gallery and check out work by Ansel Adams, Eugene Smith , the Westons or any of their cohorts. The detail in the shadows and the luminosity of the highlights is phenominal. Their photographs glow!

the smell of E-6 in the morning

[supernova87a]

I think this just reminds you that Kodak missed the boat a long time ago, and is left to ride a fad of a few hipsters / nostalgic fans who will provide some short-lived interest for an old product (an admittedly good one, in its day). Perhaps it will gain a small cult following, or sustained dedicated small fan base.

But any professional or even many amateurs know that given a good linear sensor and quality lens, you can recreate any color warmth or feeling of film you want, after taking the shot, and you don't have to wait 3 days of dunking film in a developing tank to find out how it turned out.

Heck, I (and every other smartphone user) can re-create every film response I want with Instagram or Photoshop. That was Instagram's whole point originally. Is it really worth it to pay $10 extra and several days wait for 36 shots, just to that broadcast to others that I still use film? Followed by scanning in the photo to post it on Facebook? Real analog there, huh?

Re:the smell of E-6 in the morning

[SirSlud]

You could just ask a professional photographer. And could you stop using the word hipster like you know what it means, dad?

Re:the smell of E-6 in the morning

[edis]

Everybody knows that. Sales of film are rising, as is demand for it, somehow you seem to not obey this. Kodak did not miss photo boat neither, as it is well known to be of essential force, breaking-in popular use of photographic media. Also, I observe tendency of analogue photographic equipment to be grabbed at high prices, either for collection or most-likely: use. It needs film. To handle film is unlike handling smartphone.

Re:the smell of E-6 in the morning

[mikelieman]

You don't have to scan it. Last time we were shooting film regularly ( 10+ years ago ) Kodak returned a CD with the prints.

Re:the smell of E-6 in the morning

[Anonymous Coward]

Sales of film are rising and Trump is going to be president. Something is in the water.

Re:the smell of E-6 in the morning

[Solandri]

I think this just reminds you that Kodak missed the boat a long time ago,

Kodak didn't miss the boat. They made the boat. They invented the digital camera in 1975. They were the pioneer of digital sensor technology. In the 1990s they made the first series of digital backs which fit into the film slot of existing professional SLRs (with a hard drive for storing the pictures). The damn things cost $20,000, but were immensely popular with the press who often had reporters shooting in remote locations where it was impractical to develop film. The reason Kodak has managed to stick around this long is because they owned the vast majority of early patents on digital photography. So they were kept afloat by a huge amount of royalties.

They knew exactly where the future lay. How they screwed up is that they didn't have a marketable technology once film was gone. Fuji at least had the foresight to branch out into making cameras (decent cameras, not the cheap consumer crap Kodak churned out). So when Fuji's film revenue dried up, they had camera revenue to fall back on. Film cameras and digital cameras aren't all that different to make. Kodak OTOH only concentrated on the low-end consumer camera market (e.g. disposable cameras). Digital cameras made this camera market segment obsolete right along with film, leaving Kodak with no marketable consumer products. They were the leader in sensor technology, but didn't own any fabs. That meant they knew what to make, but they didn't know how to make it. So Sony, who had a lot of experience making electronics, ended up dominating the digital sensor market (most camera phones and point and shoot digicams use Sony sensors).

Re:the smell of E-6 in the morning

[tietokone-olmi]

It takes roughly half an hour to process a batch of E-6 in your bathroom, not including the initial mixing of the relevant chemical baths (which tend to be usable for 15 to 18 rolls per litre). Another hour to dry, and another hour to cut, scan (per two rolls), and store it. From there it's exactly the workflow of digital postprocessing.

So hardly as much work as you make it out to be. Certainly not three days.

I do agree that E-6 is a bit of a weird thing to be doing, especially in small format, in the era of digital sensors that pretty much beat it at the high end while suffering the same exposure characteristics. Supposedly slides are far superior to digital projection, and I could very well be persuaded to agree -- but at the same time, digital projection is kind of very crap these days at the low end, just like any other digital display technology.

Re:the smell of E-6 in the morning

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm going to disagree just a little. Photos taken with Ektachrome Film tend to look like they came from 1960-1970, where as most photos taken after 1980 have a brighter, wider color gamut (at least when the negatives are scanned.) I scanned my familiy's complete negative collection spanning several versions of Kodak film and some films are "purple" some are "orange" when looked at straight on. But only a few strips out of all of them ever made the scanner panic and be unable to determine the correct color profile, those being ones taken around 1970.

What I'm getting at however is that the reason people may wish to go back to regular film is that the one thing that film does that digital phones can not do is soft edges and soft-focus. Sure a overkill 60Mpixel photo is great, but you have so little control over how an image is focused digitally because the sensor doesn't snap the entire image at once, especially in CMOS sensors. So you get a kind of "roll" or "wobble" in images that should actually be still. In a film camera, this is real motion blur. In a digital camera it's just rolling shutter effect that looks hideous.

Re:the smell of E-6 in the morning

[Zemran]

Do not worry, you will still be able to use your phone to take your selfies but serious photographers will be very happy to hear this and will be shouting for Kodachrome. Digital cannot provide the quality of film even with massive file sizes. Digital is brilliant for family snaps and taking shots of your dinner to post on Facebook but for real art it cannot do the job. The main difference it that an amateur who has no idea what they are doing can take a shot with their phone and then spend hours on photoshop trying out the effects whereas an artist knows what they want to produce and how to get the effect. Which is why the demand for Kodachrome will now ring out loud. You will not be held back in any way from taking shots of your cat to post on Facebook so do not worry.

Re:the smell of E-6 in the morning

[Anonymous Coward]

>Digital cannot provide the quality of film
>but for real art it cannot do the job
Do you happen to live near a major freeway or highway?

Re:the smell of E-6 in the morning

[thegarbz]

They knew exactly where the future lay.

No they didn't. They fundamentally developed the technology but it was neither Kodak sensors nor Kodak end user equipment that brought digital to the masses as you already said. If they knew where the future lay they could have invested accordingly. Instead they bet the house that the technology would never take off focusing on film chemistry instead of investing in fabrication equipment.

Sony didn't magically appear with a full production facility, they knew where photography was going in the future.

Re: the smell of E-6 in the morning

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't the point here about people who develop their own film?

Re:the smell of E-6 in the morning

[Mal-2]

Digital has been a great thing for people wanting to learn to do proper photography. The almost-zero cost per shot means more room to take chances and experiment, as well as an immediate chance to know if you got it right. I would certainly advise someone to get really good with a digital camera before they start shooting film, so that they can avoid the basic mistakes and get right on to dealing with the vagaries of chemical photography. That said, there is something special and visceral about taking a photograph on film and knowing that it's a purely physical process. I don't intend to go back to it because I just don't have the need, but it is different, and for some people, more meaningful.

Re:the smell of E-6 in the morning

[Mal-2]

Kodachrome can't come back without an E-4 lab coming back along with it. When it was discontinued, there was only one such lab in the U.S., and possibly in the world. What would go over quite well though would be a new film with the characteristics of Kodachrome, but using process E-6. I doubt such a thing is easy though, or Kodak would have done it decades ago.

Re:the smell of E-6 in the morning

[Hognoxious]

You deny that they missed the boat and then go on to list 100 reasons why they weren't on it when it sailed. Comprehension's not your strong suit, is it?

Re:the smell of E-6 in the morning

[NotAPK]

"Kodak did not miss photo boat"

We may be talking at crossed-purposes, but Kodak very much did "miss the boat". Can you buy a "Kodak" brand digital camera today? If so, is it well regarded as a market leader for quality? That's what Kodak used to have in the film industry, and they lost it all due to poor management and market strategy. They even invented the first "digital camera"...what idiots.

Re:the smell of E-6 in the morning

[Applehu Akbar]

"I think this just reminds you that Kodak missed the boat a long time ago, and is left to ride a fad of a few hipsters / nostalgic fans who will provide some short-lived interest for an old product (an admittedly good one, in its day). Perhaps it will gain a small cult following, or sustained dedicated small fan base. "

Hipsters will use it to take pictures of their vinyl records and bound books.

Re:the smell of E-6 in the morning

[hey!]

You could take GP's advice too.

Re: the smell of E-6 in the morning

[RDW]

Most people who do this shoot black and white. There's a simplified version of the E6 process for home use, but even that is significantly more fiddly than b&w (needs temperature control, etc.).

Re:the smell of E-6 in the morning

[Applehu Akbar]

You could just ask a professional photographer. And could you stop using the word hipster like you know what it means, dad?

I did ask a professional photographer, since I live in an artists' town, and she wondered why they are not bringing back Kodachrome, rather than Ektachrome. It was a dye image film whose resolution was limited by your own optics, rather than by grain. Ektachrome was developed in response to calls for higher speeds than Kodachrome's ISO 25 (that's why Kodachrome was the film of sunny days) at the expense of grain.

Re:the smell of E-6 in the morning

[Ol Olsoc]

You could just ask a professional photographer. And could you stop using the word hipster like you know what it means, dad?

Film has some characteristics, such as it's density versus exposure. In an ideal world, the density would linearly follow the exposure. A graph of it would be a straight line. In reality, at the top and bottom of the exposure scale the film responds less to increasing or decreasing exposure. Plotted on a graph, the scale is like a long lazy "S". Hence the name "S curves'.

This does give film a characteristic look, in addition to a few other characteristics like grain, and the individual color response of the color layers.

It is a defect.

Digital sensors tend to have more of a straight line response, which allow the resulting images to look different. If I wanted to, I can go into Photoshop and emulate a chemical based photograph by using Curves, and throwing some grain into the image. I have done just that when a digital image among a a group of chemical images has stood out detrimentally.

I spent many years processing and printing negs and slides, it is a little hard to imagine that some would want to go back to that, but I suppose if someone hasn't experienced it, it would seem magic. But maybe it is like tube amplifiers, and some people enjoy the inherent distortion in slide photos or tube audio. Regardless, either can be beautiful.

But there are people who actually coat their own photo emulsions on glass, or metal, and recreate processes from the early days of photography. They aren't hipsters, they are artists.

Re:the smell of E-6 in the morning

[rgmoore]

Supposedly slides are far superior to digital projection, and I could very well be persuaded to agree -- but at the same time, digital projection is kind of very crap these days at the low end, just like any other digital display technology.

Good digital projection beats the hell out of film, which is why the movie business has moved to digital*. Of course that good digital projection is expensive, but as a practical matter it takes a high quality, dedicated projection environment (e.g. a serious home theater room) before the quality of the projection is the limiting factor in quality.

*No, it's not just a cost reduction thing. In some of the tests where Hollywood was trying to figure out if digital projection was ready, film was literally booed off the screen in back-to-back comparisons. The qualitative difference, even with new prints, was that big.

Re:the smell of E-6 in the morning

[Ol Olsoc]

"Kodak did not miss photo boat"

We may be talking at crossed-purposes, but Kodak very much did "miss the boat". Can you buy a "Kodak" brand digital camera today?

Kodak performed some whacky suicidal acts back in the day. They decided to abandon professional photographers for Amateurs, but they also would abandon everyone if they felt like it.

One of the examples was the Ektaflex line. Think of it as a large Polaroid print. You would expose an 8 by 10 or larger negative in the darkroom, then it would go into an alkaline bath, then be laminated onto a receiver. After a time, you peel it off, and there is your print. While originally an amateur product, pros latched onto it for quick printing. Side benefits were it was very archival, and had some of the nicest skin tones I've ever seen. And we bought a lot of it. I had freezers full of the stuff.

Then one day, Kodak gave us the big "fuck you!" and discontinued the stuff. Some gobbldygook about not enough amateurs bought it, and by definition it was an amateur product. We begged, we pleaded, to no avail. This arbitrary decision on their part cost a lot in altered workflow.

They did this with a number of products, and a lot of us Pros over time switched to Fuji. By the time we abandoned chemical photography where I worked, there wasn't a lot of Kodak products that we used left.

Re:the smell of E-6 in the morning

[PopeRatzo]

But maybe it is like tube amplifiers, and some people enjoy the inherent distortion in slide photos or tube audio.

Ask a musician whether tube amplifiers are not as good as solid state.

Fact is, human senses respond well to certain types of distortion, no matter the medium. That's why there are still people painting with oils and playing violins and wind instruments. And singing.

Re:the smell of E-6 in the morning

[Chris Mattern]

The upshot is they made the boat, then managed to miss it. Not all that uncommon, actually. Xerox pulled off the same feat.

Re:the smell of E-6 in the morning

[PopeRatzo]

Can you buy a "Kodak" brand digital camera today?

You also can't buy a Lexus motorcycle. Does that mean Lexus "missed the boat" on motorcycles?

Re:the smell of E-6 in the morning

[Ol Olsoc]

You deny that they missed the boat and then go on to list 100 reasons why they weren't on it when it sailed. Comprehension's not your strong suit, is it?

This is Slashdot ya know. Kodak is widely considered as one of the world leaders in missing the boat. This can all be summed up in that they abandoned the professionals while banking on the people who abandoned film photography first - the bottom end consumers, who ditched their 110 film cameras for phone cameras.

Re:the smell of E-6 in the morning

[PopeRatzo]

You are correct. This is something that cannot be done with a digital camera:

https://www.getty.edu/art/exhi...

Re:the smell of E-6 in the morning

[Ol Olsoc]

What I'm getting at however is that the reason people may wish to go back to regular film is that the one thing that film does that digital phones can not do is soft edges and soft-focus.

That is an artifact of lenses, not film - unless the film camera was so badly designed that the film lay largely outside the plan of focus.

Re:the smell of E-6 in the morning

[hey!]

Speaking of E-6, this would be why they chose to revive Ektachrome but not Kodachrome. Ektachrome is developed with the E-6 process which can easily be done in a home darkroom. Kodachrome is developed the more elaborate K-14 process.

But any professional or even many amateurs know that given a good linear sensor and quality lens, you can recreate any color warmth or feeling of film you want, after taking the shot, and you don't have to wait 3 days of dunking film in a developing tank to find out how it turned out.

If you knew exactly what you were aiming for, perhaps you could. But would you know what to aim for?

Here's the thing about artistic freedom and convenience: the process matters. A lot of creativity comes from struggling with the limitations of your tools. Imagine you had a technology that allowed people to effortlessly capture exactly what they see, as they see it; then effortlessly manipulate that image in any way they could imagine. While the number image creators would no doubt go up, would the number of accomplished visual artists go up? Simple intuition would say yes, but my own forays into various art forms suggest not. Time, care, and frustration all send your imagination in unexpected directions.

So I see people trying to revive film photography as similar to people who continue to paint portraits when photography would allow them the freedom to experiment with much less effort. It's not that a painted portrait is inherently artistically superior to any photographic image; it's just that the limitations of paint are part of those artists' creative process.

Re: the smell of E-6 in the morning

[Cmdln Daco]

Temperature control was far more difficult in 1986 than it is today. Just like with many other processes, the degree of precision available today is at least a magnitude better than in the recent past.

I anticipate there will soon be moderately priced digitally controlled temperature baths for the amateur market cropping up as a side result of Kodak reintroducing Ektachrome.

Re:the smell of E-6 in the morning

[Ol Olsoc]

Digital cannot provide the quality of film even with massive file sizes.

If you define quality as the S shaped D log e curves, that's a film inherent defect, and if for some reason I wanted to emulate that defect, it is about 10 seconds in Photoshop to select the curve, then flatten the top and bottom end to kill the contrast there.

Which is why the demand for Kodachrome will now ring out loud.

Hate to burst your bubble, but Kodachrome is gone, and won't be coming back. A non-substansive process like Kodachrome is seriously complex, and no one, especially Kodak, has any reason to resume manufacturing of a complex and dead process like that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Re:the smell of E-6 in the morning

[Cmdln Daco]

They owned major components that made up the boat. By definition they sailed with the boat.

But we were talking about comprehension.... umm...

Re:the smell of E-6 in the morning

[Cmdln Daco]

People like you keep using the word 'hipster' to describe others. I think in the final historical analysis, the people who we will look back at and despise will be those who spent their lives sneering at others.

The 'sneering' subculture is largely made up out of the people who in any sane era would be known as 'the hipsters.' A small portion of those presently known as 'the hipsters' are to a degree being shitheads. However, the meta-shitheads are those poking fun at them.

Re:the smell of E-6 in the morning

[Ol Olsoc]

Kodachrome can't come back without an E-4 lab coming back along with it.

Kodak didn't use E-4. E-4 was the predecessor of the E-6 Ektachrome process. Kodachrome used the K-14 process, which was tremendously different from any other process out there.

What would go over quite well though would be a new film with the characteristics of Kodachrome, but using process E-6. I doubt such a thing is easy though, or Kodak would have done it decades ago.

What makes Kodachrome so different was that it's dyes were not incorporated into the emulsion of the film, but introduced during processing. Extremely complex process, and you need a competent staff chemist to watchdog over the machinery. The results were beautiful and sharp, and it was much more archival than any of the other color slide processes. The E-4 you mentioned was terrible - E6 much better.

But there just isn't enough demand for Kodachrome to justify the great expense of setting up new lines to make the film, and re-build the processing lines again. And E-6? Not going to look like Kodachrome.

Re:the smell of E-6 in the morning

[chmod a x mojo]

But any professional or even many amateurs know that given a good linear sensor and quality lens, you can recreate any color warmth or feeling of film you want, after taking the shot, and you don't have to wait 3 days of dunking film in a developing tank to find out how it turned out.

I'm a "professional" photographer in the fact that I sell portraits and requested stock images occasionally. Digital can NOT replace film as a drop in. It doesn't matter what you do in Lightroom / PhotoShop. It doesn't matter what plugins you use for effects, even the high dollar ones that are meant to replicate older films and development settings only come CLOSE.

The people who want this film back are the ones developing and printing from home, not the ones that take their film rolls to the local drug store to be butchered in a machine that hasn't had the developing fluids changed in the last decade. So no, it doesn't take "three days" either. Hell, just developing film at a dedicated photolab only takes something like 2-3 hours for the most part.

That isn't saying digital is bad; you can get beautiful shots on digital, don't have to scan in the negatives to get digital copies, and it's without a doubt much cheaper since a memory card can be re-used many times unlike a roll of film. It just can't be a drop in replacement for film in many situations.

Don't even get me started on medium format digital prices either. They are just insane.

Heck, I (and every other smartphone user) can re-create every film response I want with Instagram or Photoshop. That was Instagram's whole point originally.

well, you kind of can, but it's just a real shitty imitation. Even if you could reliably and accurately reproduce the film color and grain pattern ( which again, you can't ), what are you going to do about the shitty super tiny sensor on that phone? What about the absolute shit glass lenses that phones use?

Even APS-C sensors are pretty bad at recording data compared to the resolution that some of the classic "super films" had. Older films had higher resolutions than precision ground glass can reach, allowing you to capture literally every detail possible.

Re: the smell of E-6 in the morning

[tomhath]

Kodak saw digital coming way back in the 70's. But they were a film and chemical company, not a camera company like Canon or Nikon.

Re: the smell of E-6 in the morning

[Anonymous Coward]

It means that Lexus has chosen to not be a motorcycle company.

Like Kodak chose to not be a digital photography company.

Re:the smell of E-6 in the morning

[Anonymous Coward]

> And singing.

No that is wrongthink and illegal, computer singing is better, just listen to Autotune (I forget his first name).

Re: the smell of E-6 in the morning

[Anonymous Coward]

We must demand it. I want all the world to look like a sunny day again. Right now it looks like a dreary digital apocalypse.

Re:the smell of E-6 in the morning

[Anonymous Coward]

I suspect some get your point but, to be clear, you can't get *that* shot with a film camera either unless it's an 8x10. You probably know why there too but this whole thread is silly enough as it is. What we're calling "Kodak" here is a bunch of IP owned by the Kodak UK pension plan and I hope they succeed. It was Kodak USA that failed to see, not the future (they invented digital capture) but that film, although smaller, could continue to make money for the company and it's investors in the digital age. They failed to scale down the enormous coaters to something that fit the product demand loads. Bad, short-sighted management (what did the President see in that guy anyway?)

Thanks everyone for letting me add to the silliness, buy some Ektachrome and get it into a camera; there's probably one sitting on the floor of your parent's closet. And for all you kids who swallow the market hype about digital, you'll never get to open that little yellow box of Kodachome slides, fresh from the lab, and smell them. Suckers.

Re: the smell of E-6 in the morning

[Anonymous Coward]

When I look back on all the crap you wrote in your post, it's a wonder that you think at all.
Maybe your lack of education hasn't hurt you none, but you still can't see the writing on the wall. Kodachrome is coming back!

Re:the smell of E-6 in the morning

[Octorian]

Don't even get me started on medium format digital prices either. They are just insane.

This is one important part that everyone else here is oblivious to, since they probably think that all photography derives from the 35mm format.

It is *much* easier to make a larger piece of film than it is to make a larger digital sensor.
There are cameras that take film that is larger than 35mm.

Sure, at the 35mm level, you can probably argue that there's not much reason to bother with film on the quality/resolution front anymore. But the moment you go to medium/large format films and cameras, film can give you something that would probably cost the same as a small car if you tried to find a matching digital camera.

There are also a lot of interesting camera designs from over the years, in the world of medium format photography. None of these designs have digital equivalents.

Re:the smell of E-6 in the morning

[itsdapead]

I think this just reminds you that Kodak missed the boat a long time ago

It wasn't an easy boat for Kodak to jump on.

Kodak's reputation (and the core of their business) was film and film processing, not making good cameras . Their famous cameras of the past - Brownie, Instamatic etc. - were mainly about innovations in film & processing, not cameras per se. The arrival of digital killed the "Gillette razor blade" business model - suddenly Kodak had to start making its money from actually selling cameras, not film. They were stuffed.

Kodak did launch digital cameras - both professional 'digital backs' and a consumer range (ISTR they tried to establish a standard camera OS) - but if you see a rack of expensive digital cameras of various brands, which one were you going to pick up first: Nikon, Canon, Olympus... or Kodak? Right. Even Sony, by then, had a rep for making video cameras & they got themselves some more cred by using Zeiss-branded lenses. Panasonic, likewise, released Leica-branded digicams.

Also, in the 90s, Kodak did start to shift their processing systems to a digital workflow - i.e. scan the negs and print digitally, offering all sorts of post-processing and printing options - which would have put them in pole position to offer print services for digital cameras. One spin-off was PhotoCD for which they had great plans - but in practice I think it just got used by semi-pros who wanted a cheap way of digitising their slides. As for print-from-digital, people getting blow-ups of their favourite shots is never going to replace the volume of business from developing film. I guess their biggest mistake was letting the likes of Epson beat them to the punch when it came to photo-quality home inkjet printing (welcome back King Camp Gillette!)

Re: the smell of E-6 in the morning

[magarity]

History is full of failed companies whose management got stuck in "we are an x company" mentality instead of "we are a company". Even if they were a film and chemical company they should have adapted. Canon and Nikon could just as easily have been stuck in "we are a film camera company" mode but they didn't.

Re:the smell of E-6 in the morning

[magarity]

Kodak's engineers came up with those things but upper management was entirely arrogant in the "digital will never replace film" mentality.

Re:the smell of E-6 in the morning

[Hognoxious]

Owned schmowned. Clearly they made such a commercial success of it that they didn't file for chapter 11 in January 2012.

  If they were ever on the boat they fell over the side.

Re:the smell of E-6 in the morning

[alvinrod]

Is it really worth it to pay $10 extra and several days wait for 36 shots, just to that broadcast to others that I still use film?

When everyone can be a photographer, some people need to find a way to set themselves apart. To show everyone that they're serious, or talk about how the physical process preserves blah blah blah. For some people it's about being quaint or nostalgic more than the finished product, maybe out of some desire to feel as though they've accomplished something and not necessarily a narcissistic desire for attention. I wonder if in another decade or so more people will be into pottery and making their own bowls and mugs just so they can feel like they don't have to rely on the 3D printer to do it all for them.

Re:the smell of E-6 in the morning

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not a quality thing, it's a control thing.
The projectors all phone home for the key to decrypt the film every time they're played.
No more "I'll run this after we close for my friends" without the studio getting paid.

It's also worlds cheaper then making prints and significantly easier to distribute to numerous theaters to get the opening week revenues up.
Don't try to sell the quality thing. Early digital theater projection was 1280x1024 with anamorphic lenses. Seeing the pixels at the movies was depressing.

It's about control and cost, nothing more.

Re:the smell of E-6 in the morning

[Ol Olsoc]

Ask a musician whether tube amplifiers are not as good as solid state.

The distortion that a tube amp has, especially in the preamp stage, is a bedrock effect of rock music. It is a desirable feature - to the point that there are tube preamps designed to invoke it. As to "better"? Pretty subjective. I like the tube distortion, kinda warm and mellow feeling, and it can make a guitar sound pretty cool when you overdrive it.

Fact is, human senses respond well to certain types of distortion, no matter the medium. That's why there are still people painting with oils and playing violins and wind instruments. And singing.

Yes. I don't have any issue with someone exploiting an artistic effect of a defect. Which is what most of these effects are. Years ago, I dabbled in the alternative photographic processes like cyanotype and VanDyke, and metal etching printing, and gold toning. If I get back into it, I'd probably deal with digital printed negatives and albumen printing.

Oddly enough, when I was doing that alternative stuff as a hobby/art, Ektachrome was as mainstream as you could get. Now it might be considered alternative. As well, my experience with it has been that it's main characteristic is a tendency towards coolness, and that d log e S curve that tends to flatten the contrast of the highest and lowest parts of the image. It also has a but less dynamic range than it's deceased cousin Kodachrome.

Now, the trick to using it for art will be to exploit those characteristics - no small feat in a film and process that had been engineered forand largely achieved a reality based look. There is a certain interest in slide work. We'll see how people can exploit that today. Personally, I'm not all that interested, having processed a lot of E-6 film. I'll leave that to others who may not have had the experience when Ektachrome was mainstream.

Re:the smell of E-6 in the morning

[Ol Olsoc]

> And singing.

No that is wrongthink and illegal, computer singing is better, just listen to Autotune (I forget his first name).

That's what Beats by Dr. Dre is for.

Re: the smell of E-6 in the morning

[Ol Olsoc]

We must demand it. I want all the world to look like a sunny day again. Right now it looks like a dreary digital apocalypse.

I have seen some old Kodachrome Prints. They were the Kodachrome emulsion on a White plastic base. The ones I had seen were beautiful and jarring. Beautiful because the color reproduction was as close to perfect as any film could be. And jarring because we are so used to seeing color and image fading that it seems odd to see that Grandma and Grandpa looked pretty much just like us when they were young, and the world was bright and vibrant.

Re: the smell of E-6 in the morning

[Ol Olsoc]

When I look back on all the crap you wrote in your post, it's a wonder that you think at all. Maybe your lack of education hasn't hurt you none, but you still can't see the writing on the wall. Kodachrome is coming back!

Oh Hooo! Tell me all about the Kodachrome process.

Re: the smell of E-6 in the morning

[sjames]

Actually, at one point Kodak did decide to be a digital photography company, but quickly failed do to a half hearted effort. It kind of faded away after their initial investment due to lack of effort.

Re: the smell of E-6 in the morning

[Anonymous Coward]

They could have instead come up with camera internals and wait to be integrated by Nikon or Canon or whomever.

Re:the smell of E-6 in the morning

[sjames]

Actually, they did make and own the boat. Then they bizarrely decided not to be on it when it sailed. Perhaps some form of corporate dementia. They didn't even watch it sail away. They just took a nap until they woke up under water a few years later.

Re:the smell of E-6 in the morning

[Anonymous Coward]

Digital cannot provide the quality of film even with massive file sizes.

Mmm, smell that? Fresh cow pies.

Re: the smell of E-6 in the morning

[hjf]

Nikon did get stuck in the "we are a photo camera company. video is a gimmick" and they lost the cine market to Canon, Sony and Panasonic.
Many loyal nikon owners switched to Canon when Nikon decided it couldn't be bothered with adding GOOD video features to their cameras, and not the novelty video clips they still shoot. Yes, Nikons now shoot 4K but... you can't change the aperture while recording. That's just lame.

Re: the smell of E-6 in the morning

[hjf]

There is pretty much only one german company making those baths and they were expensive as hell. Jobo. Amazing machines, over $2K used.

Re: the smell of E-6 in the morning

[edis]

Do failed companies have growing sales and expansion of their products? Kodak is well regarded as emulsion supplier, and expensive it is, the larger format, the more crazier. They well can be not into digital, not discovering their thing in this amalgama of electronic sophistication and variations of the same Double-Gaussian lens world. They do not have to, and even if they tried, not each company has the same fortunes - not a problem itself. You have more film/chemical companies with other successful brands like Ilford or Foma. It is still business. May be growing, even if you refuse to accept that part.

Re:the smell of E-6 in the morning

[Hognoxious]

Actually, they did make and own the boat.

Actually, I never said they didn't.

Then they bizarrely decided not to be on it when it sailed

Pretty much a textbokk definition of missing it. QED.

You can ALL fuck off now, apart from Ol Olsoc because he can actually read.

Re:the smell of E-6 in the morning

[Anonymous Coward]

All color films are dye based images, the silver is converted to dye during development.

The reason why it's Ektachrome is that Kodachrome is extremely difficult to manufacture, and process (not to mention an environmental disaster), whereas the basic emulsions for Ektachrome are still in production through Kodak's movie film business. There is no other production use for Kodachrome other than still film photography.

Re:the smell of E-6 in the morning

[Anonymous Coward]

Kodak was actually forced to get out of the consumer market camera business for anti trust reasons. This happened in the 50's I believe.

Re:the smell of E-6 in the morning

[dgatwood]

... but you have so little control over how an image is focused digitally because the sensor doesn't snap the entire image at once, especially in CMOS sensors.

Only in toy cameras—those with CMOS sensors that lack a global electronic shutter, when used in cameras that lack a mechanical shutter. With DSLRs, there's a physical, mechanical shutter in front of that sensor, so the sensor is, in fact, exposed at once, and then read out after it is no longer being exposed, just like film. And many mirrorless cameras instead have a global electronic shutter.

The problem is not that digital tech isn't capable of being as good as film, but rather that cell phones are not real cameras and probably never will be. They're toys. A global shutter requires more electronics on die, which is not easy to reconcile with the desire to make the entire surface area of a tiny sensor be photo-sensitive. It can be done, sure, but AFAIK nobody has done it yet. I find it utterly depressing that a decade after folks started complaining about the iPhone's rolling shutter, Apple's engineers still haven't insisted on making the one camera change that would actually dramatically improve the quality of their cameras... and neither has anybody else.

But moving to film as an alternative to cell phones is like switching to a 1970 Mustang because your hoverboard isn't powerful enough, doesn't have enough range, and can't carry any cargo, then claiming that EVs are inferior for those three reasons. :-)

Re:the smell of E-6 in the morning

[Dogtanian]

Ellis D. Tripp's response already said some of what I was going to say.

But yes, Kodachome was discontinued several years *before* Ektachrome because the (admittedly clever) process was far more complex and demanding than the more recent- and by then, far more popular E6 process.

Kodachrome, for all that everyone went on about it- particularly when its discontinuation was announced in 2009- had been in decline in the face of E6 emulsions for a long time- since at least the late 1980s as far as I'm aware. Apparently Kodak had developed an ISO 400 version but didn't release it due to dislike and a lack of interest.

Given that it used a unique process that was not only more costly (AFAIK) than E6 but wouldn't have had the same benefits of scale- particularly with its declining popularity- and that as time went on fewer and fewer places could process it until latterly there was only one lab worldwide- in the US- able to process it (and complaints about the quality of processing latterly), you can see why it was burden on Kodak to support and why it was discontinued in the face of film sales that were falling rapidly overall anyway.

(I've no idea about whether its manufacture was more complex than other films too).

I'm absolutely certain Kodachrome's not coming back even with the slight revival of film in recent years- even that's slightly misleading in its prominence. In the past, film was a *very* mass market item- and the majority of users were people like my Mum who was never into photography per se, but only as a means to take snapshots of people and events. She had a point-and-click 126 camera; now she has a digital one. The vast majority of film sales were to people like that; as a means to an end. My Dad was a bit more into it and used to have rangefinders, SLRs and high-end compacts, but even he hasn't used film since he got a DSLR in 2008. I haven't used film in almost ten years.

For all that hipsters (if I wanted to be stereotypically disparaging!) use film and some people will always want it and support a niche market, it's not ever- in the remotely forseeable future- going to return to anything more than a small percentage of the sales it enjoyed.

There's probably an economically viable place for the E6-based Ektachrome in there. Kodachrome though? I can't see it ever being remotely viable again given the cost, uniqueness and support issues surrounding it- along with the fact that all the labs have now closed. Sales of the occasional roll to novelty-seeking hobbyists simply wouldn't come close to justifying the cost.

Re:the smell of E-6 in the morning

[Dogtanian]

Ektachrome was developed in response to calls for higher speeds than Kodachrome's ISO 25 (that's why Kodachrome was the film of sunny days) at the expense of grain.

One other thing- by the late 1980s, Kodachrome *was* available in faster speeds- specifically ISO 64 and 200- in addition to the ISO 25.

Matter of fact, the times I did buy Kodachrome back then it was only ever the 64 or 200. Can't remember if the 25 was widely available, since I don't think it would have occurred to me to buy something that slow for general use.

Re:the smell of E-6 in the morning

[PopeRatzo]

Yes. I don't have any issue with someone exploiting an artistic effect of a defect. Which is what most of these effects are. Years ago, I dabbled in the alternative photographic processes like cyanotype and VanDyke, and metal etching printing, and gold toning. If I get back into it, I'd probably deal with digital printed negatives and albumen printing.

I've done some platinum printing, and it's absolutely luminous.

Albumen printing is also something special.

Re: the smell of E-6 in the morning

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey man, I'm just mimicking the song!

Re:the smell of E-6 in the morning

[Anonymous Coward]

The production of E-6 film by Kodak is still going on, only it is in the movie film side of the company. The K14 process is completely gone.

Re: the smell of E-6 in the morning

[jonwil]

Given the number of times I have seen geeks on the internet produce a cheap version of something that used to be expensive, it wouldn't surprise me to see a hack-a-day post about a "home-made E6 machine" sometime in the near future (assuming Kodak will sell said geek the processing chemicals)

Re: the smell of E-6 in the morning

[RDW]

That's an automated Rolls-Royce solution, though. You can keep everything warm with a laboratory-style thermostat-controlled water bath (available quite cheaply on ebay or from lab surplus suppliers), and just use a conventional daylight developing tank. But it's still possible to get commercial E6 done for probably less than the price of the film, which is what I suspect most Ektachrome users will do - Fuji's E6 films are still in production, and have kept this industry ticking along on a small scale (though you may well have to use a mail order lab these days).

Re:the smell of E-6 in the morning

[lalleglad]

I am not a professional photographer, but I have used my Hasselblad 500 CM Classic a lot since 1991, and I worked with you in Harmony on Airport Road in Mississauga, around 1997.

I am still using my Hasselblad with various types of film, and my favorites are Fuji Velvia 50ASA and Provia 100ASA, positive films that produce breathtaking results when the light is set right!

Current 48bit film sensors are good, but just like vinyl albums compared to CD, film has an extra edge to nationality and the only thing they are lacking is the ease of use. That is of course also important, but in situations where you can live with it, it produces exquisite results!

I am not a hipster, so I can't comment on that ;-)

Re:the smell of E-6 in the morning

[lalleglad]

I wrote 'to nationality' when I meant 'towards naturalistic results'.
Normally I wouldn't correct such a small error, but in these times it seems like the better choice :-|

Re:the smell of E-6 in the morning

[Eravnrekaree]

the low end market evaporated because of cell phones. They foolishly were not invested in the high end market, even though it being obvious that this is where they needed to go.

Re:the smell of E-6 in the morning

[budgenator]

It wasn't for general use, Kodachrome ISO 25 was used mainly for fine portraits, especially for women because its warmth brought out pastel tones best, which flattered the female form.

Re:the smell of E-6 in the morning

[Anonymous Coward]

If you mean the field of focus created by tilting the view camera lens, yes of course you can do that digitally. You use a similar view camera but with a digital back, of which there are many available.

Re:the smell of E-6 in the morning

[budgenator]

We did win one with Great Yellow Father with SO115, which they rebranded as Technipan 2415; I've had lots of fun playing with that.

Re:the smell of E-6 in the morning

[PopeRatzo]

If you mean the field of focus created by tilting the view camera lens

If you think that "field of focus" is all that's going on in that photograph, you should probably stick with your iPhone's camera.

Re: the smell of E-6 in the morning

[budgenator]

Sony was the 800 lbs gorilla in video, and ALL forms of magnetic tape recording, even Teac their primary competitor bought significant pieces of hardware from Sony for mag tape equipment. Sony had a total lock on broadcast quality video equipment from Camera, tape recorders, production equipment and even video printers. Sony leveraged that market dominance to enter the consumer market, later Panasonic and then Canon clawed their way over Sony.

Re: the smell of E-6 in the morning

[budgenator]

A good thermometer and an aquarium heater is all you need for a decent water bath. I did mostly B&W, but also dabbled in C41, E6 and E4 film and printing.

Re:the smell of E-6 in the morning

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope, Kodak pretty much invented digital imaging, but rather than capitalize on it, they tried to bury it so that it wouldn't hurt their film business.

By the time they realized that that wouldn't work, they were well behind the other companies.

Re:the smell of E-6 in the morning

[Anonymous Coward]

A five digit UID calling someone else "Dad"? LOL

Re:the smell of E-6 in the morning

[Anonymous Coward]

It's actually a well known pattern all over industry. Suggested read "The Innovator's Dilemma"

Re:the smell of E-6 in the morning

[Anonymous Coward]

it's means it is. I don't know how much clearer I can be.

Re: the smell of E-6 in the morning

[unimacs]

I always thought that developing color film was a difficult process that you couldn't do at home without specialized equipment. Not so. I hadn't development my own film since a middle school photography class decades ago but this year I got back into film and have been pleasantly surprised. For C41 color film you can get all the chemicals you need in a kit for less than $30 shipped and it's good for many rolls.

Being a geek I used a raspberry pi, a temp sensor, and a relay to shut a thrift store roaster oven filled with water on and off to maintain the proper temp. But people get good results just filling a cooler with water and adjusting the temp by adding hot or cold water.

No one will confuse me with a hipster. So why do I shoot film? I'm not going to say it's better than digital. After all, I end up scanning the negatives anyway. It does have a different quality that you may or may not prefer. The longer process does make you think about your shots more, and learning about film has given me a much better understanding of photography in general. Even with digital cameras I've been able to get results that I never could have before.

Another benefit is that excellent film cameras and lenses (that are still great by today's standards) are available for next to nothing.

Re: the smell of E-6 in the morning

[magarity]

It's great for Kodak that management has been able to bring it back out of bankruptcy; my main point is that they might not have had to go through that if management had been more flexible in their thinking as film business declined.

Re: the smell of E-6 in the morning

[penguinstorm7261]

You or point about buying a Kodak digital camera is fairly off base: you couldn't really buy a Kodak branded *film*'camera at the time the market shifted. For another perspective, you *could* buy an HP camera and as i used to point out to potential customers at a store i worked at (bleak times!): WHY WOULD YOU? HP is a computer company-- buy a camera from a camera company. anyway, not apologizing for Kodak who definitely missed a numbe rof opportunities-- but your point is misleading at best and wildly inaccurate at worst.

Re: the smell of E-6 in the morning

[Anonymous Coward]

The decision wasn't arbitrary: it was economic. Too costly to produce in small volumes, insufficient demand for large.

This is rational for a business' perspective--wait until it happens to desktop computers.

Re: the smell of E-6 in the morning

[penguinstorm7261]

There is no such thing as a "film lens." Lenses are lenses. What you attach them to is an entirely different matter.

Re:the smell of E-6 in the morning

[Ol Olsoc]

We did win one with Great Yellow Father with SO115, which they rebranded as Technipan 2415; I've had lots of fun playing with that.

Yeah, I used to use that one for metallurgy photos. exposure was critical, so there was a lot of bracketing. But when you hit the sweet spot, it really worked great with low contrast weld samples to kick the contrast up.

Re: the smell of E-6 in the morning

[Ol Olsoc]

The decision wasn't arbitrary: it was economic. Too costly to produce in small volumes, insufficient demand for large.

This is rational for a business' perspective--wait until it happens to desktop computers.

Funny, the pros were keeping sales of Ektaflex pretty brisk.

Re:the smell of E-6 in the morning

[ChrisMaple]

Films were being constantly improved over the years, and by 1967 there was Anscochrome 500 and Kodachrome 400, even while the highest speed color negative film I was aware of was Kodacolor 100. In the 1970's film manufacturers realized this was a ridiculous situation and there was a revolution in the speed and resolution of color negative film. All this was happening in films that incorporated dye couplers in the emulsion, i.e. not Kodachrome. Indeed, after perhaps 1975 there were no improvements in Kodachrome 25 or 64, so the dye-coupled products eventually won out. By the time Kodachrome 25 was discontinued it was inferior in both speed and resolving power to Ektachrome 100. Neither of them was anywhere near as good as equivalent speed color negative film, and the color negative film is more resistant to highlight blowout.

The idea that Kodachrome's "resolution was limited by your own optics, rather than by grain." can be easily disproved by anyone with a microscope.

Re: the smell of E-6 in the morning

[unimacs]

Thanks for clearing that up for me. ;)

Here's what I meant. I picked up a Canon AE-1 Program with a 50mm F/1.4 FD lens for free. The equivalent modern lens will cost over $300. Now there are digital cameras you can use that old lens with if you have the proper adaptor. However a Canon DSLR isn't one of them. I'm not saying it's impossible to use on a Canon DSLR but the results won't be good. There's plenty of info on the Internet that explains why. Canon couldn't get autofocus to work well with their old FD lenses so they went with a whole different system, - which effectively made a ton of excellent lenses obsolete, - unless you use an old camera.

I also bought an old Canon rangefinder for $10. This one has the 40mm F1.7 lens. This camera and lens combo is so good, it's often been called the poor man's Leica. I'm afraid with this lens you are stuck with a film camera because it's permanently attached.

Finally, I got a Canon Elan II/e for $15. This came with a pretty nice EF 28-80mm F/3.5-5.6 USM lens. It's one of the best, if not the best kit zoom lenses Canon ever made. Now, it is still a kit lens and not exactly top of the line, but people will still spend over $100 on them on eBay and it will work just fine with any modern Canon camera. However, because it was attached to a film camera, the quality of the lens went unnoticed and I got it for a song.

Re:the smell of E-6 in the morning

[ChrisMaple]

Although digital sensors are linear (if designed that way - they can be designed, for instance, to have a log response) the default output of most digital cameras (especially the cheaper ones) is JPEG, and JPEG often uses the sRGB profile https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPEG which has an average gamma of about 0.45. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SRGB. (Incidentally, this nonlinear response is a good choice, it provides a much wider dynamic range.)

Although the top part of the "S curve" is characteristic of most film developing, the bottom part ("toe") can be extended or nonexistent depending upon the developer used. My favorite developer was D76, which as it turns out is an inferior developer: it has a long toe caused by borax in the formulation, which eats away at the emulsion before the critical regions that receive the least light are fully developed. The result is muddy dark areas.

Re:the smell of E-6 in the morning

[unimacs]

I'm not sure I agree. I learned a lot more about photography after starting to shoot film. With digital there is a tendency to shoot a hundred photos and let the camera do everything. You have no idea why some photos turn out and others don't. There's no reason you can't learn everything you need to with a digital camera, there's just little incentive to.

With a film camera on the other hand, now each shot matters and you want to make sure you get it right most of the time. So you learn about iso, aperture, and shutter speed. You learn what is meant by the term "fast lens". My digital photos have gotten much better since I started shooting film. I've gotten shots in tricky light that I never knew enough to get right before.

Re:the smell of E-6 in the morning

[Anonymous Coward]

"Digital cannot provide the quality of film even with massive file sizes"
Technically, I suppose that could be true, since you didn't specify what "quality" it is that you're comparing. However, even modest digital files can certainly meet the spatial resolution of film. Any modern digital camera is going to be limited spatially by the optics, not the sensor. Colour response is a little harder to compare, but good modern sensors have quantum efficiency ~70% and read-noise around 10 electrons - that is, we're only one order-of-magnitude away from counting the individual photons.

You can do better with film in a lab, but I doubt you can beat that under many real-world situations. As others have posted, once you've got a good linear image, you can apply whatever filters you want.

Re:the smell of E-6 in the morning

[ChrisMaple]

Digital phones have very small apertures compared to a 35 mm camera. That means that for the same f/-number, the depth of field for the phone-camera is in the range of 4 to 7 times as great. In short, it's difficult for the phone-camera not to be in focus.

Selective focus is the realm of large apertures, which implies large sensors.and wide-open lenses.

Re: the smell of E-6 in the morning

[ChrisMaple]

Kodachrome keeps well in the dark, but the dyes are not light-fast. Put them in direct sunlight and they'll be seriously degraded in about 2 weeks. A better product for color prints was made by Ciba, but it used very toxic chemicals and in any case is also no longer available.

Re:the smell of E-6 in the morning

[ChrisMaple]

In the 1970s, a company called Dignan printed approximate instructions and provided chemicals that in principle would have allowed a very capable amateur to eventually be able to process Kodachrome at home. I tried it once and although I did get the reversal process to work, the color range was clear-yellow-black with no other color showing up. Based on my limited experience and what I've read, I'd guess it would be possible to make a lab capable of processing Kodachrome (probably not very well) for perhaps $100,000.

From the 1950's to the early 1970's there were a number of fly-by-night film and processing companies that did a poor job of making and processing film. I don't look forward to a re-emergence of those conditions.

Re: the smell of E-6 in the morning

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe your lack of education hasn't hurt you none

Oh, the irony.

Re:the smell of E-6 in the morning

[Waccoon]

I used to work in a small photo store using their DLS Minilab workstation software (which drove a Noritsu printer). It was awful. Aside from constant crashes and the inexplicable problem of losing connection to the storage database (which required a restart and flushed the printing queue), it also had horrible color accuracy. The biggest problem we had when doing any kind of digital printing was that all highlights had this horrible yellow halo. It was obvious the minilab wasn't converting color spaces correctly and all the colors were way out of gamut. Printing anything digitized by the built-in 35mm film scanner was okay, but anything imported from a flatbed scanner or digital media was ugly as sin. Don't even get me started on the accessory modules, like the greeting card templates, which frequently brought down or locked-up the whole system.

There were huge quality control issues with both their hardware and software. It's obvious to me why they weren't competitive, despite their early "investments" into digital technology.

Re:the smell of E-6 in the morning

[Mal-2]

And I was limited by budget.

Did I have to pay attention to detail? Sure. But sometimes your best guess is exactly that, a guess, and then you bracket. This means burning through your film three or five times as fast, and you still may not get it right. Not only that, you have to wait until the processed film comes back before you can determine what actually worked.

If you use auto-everything and don't understand why it works most of the time or how to compensate for it the rest of the time, that's on your head. It doesn't matter whether you're shooting film or pixels.

Re:the smell of E-6 in the morning

[Big Hairy Ian]

Wake me when they come up with a technology for taking analog pictures on vinyl that they can hit two hipster birds with one stone

Re: the smell of E-6 in the morning

[edis]

True, just companies are not destined to be eternally great. Sometimes they are in the right place at the right time, and do the right thing to prosper. Other times they do only in-average, therefore are not in the best league. As to camera design/manufacturing - isn't it, that most, if not all, of them now have very similar genes of Japanese precision R&D, followed by more economic Asian manufacturing? Kodak wasn't in this line by its legacy, while sporadic attempts were falling out of that winning model.

Re:the smell of E-6 in the morning

[Dogtanian]

It wasn't for general use

I appreciate that by the late 80s, this wouldn't have been the case- that's why it probably wouldn't have occurred to me to buy it even if it was on sale alongside its faster brethren in mainstream shops like Boots.

But I assume that in earlier years- when colour films were generally quite slow- this would have been considered a more mainstream speed. (Wikipedia confirms that up until the early 60s, all versions of Kodachrome were ISO 10 to 16!)

I was under the impression that Ektachrome was more popular for portrait and fashion photography- at least by the late 1980s- due to its subdued neutrality...?

Re:the smell of E-6 in the morning

[K10W]

I think this just reminds you that Kodak missed the boat a long time ago, and is left to ride a fad of a few hipsters / nostalgic fans who will provide some short-lived interest for an old product (an admittedly good one, in its day). Perhaps it will gain a small cult following, or sustained dedicated small fan base. But any professional or even many amateurs know that given a good linear sensor and quality lens, you can recreate any color warmth or feeling of film you want, after taking the shot, and you don't have to wait 3 days of dunking film in a developing tank to find out how it turned out. Heck, I (and every other smartphone user) can re-create every film response I want with Instagram or Photoshop. That was Instagram's whole point originally. Is it really worth it to pay $10 extra and several days wait for 36 shots, just to that broadcast to others that I still use film? Followed by scanning in the photo to post it on Facebook? Real analog there, huh?

exactly, only reason to shoot film still is for large or medium format becasue you can't afford digital equivalent. Even then Pentax 645Z now fills that niche on the budget end for the MF folks and would trash film equivalent. Those with a NEED for MF couldn't get the results they need with film TBH compared to hassy and phaseone backs/MF bodies.I got rid of my film slr gear years ago and never looked back. I am not pro as I don't do it for living but digital can do everything film could and better. I'm mainly indoor multi monoblock studio shooter (not for money but passionate hobby for the most part) but do some night astro and cityscape stuff too. The astro work of caoturing DSO with stacks wasn't possible in film days but the latter was only now no reciprosity failure isn't a thing. My dad worked for Kodak and taught me a lot since a young age and I just kept it up and it became a serious passion so it isn't like I never had film experience since that was what I knew first.

Modern sensors are something film cannot match since colour curves in ACR/Photoshop or Capture1 (I use both) can simulate any film response. Coupled with the better modern glass plus improvements in micromirrors and sensors means detail is off the charts compared to film, same with DR, noise/grain and chroma accuracy and gamuts, plus conveniences like no need to use filters in b&w due to bayer array, no need to use different whitebalanced film (or even bother with whibal card since can do it in post if shoot raw, yeah some say you still need to as histogram is affected by whitebalance as made from jpeg preview of the raw data BUT if you meter lights with sekonic 358 or similar that doesn't apply). Massive memory cards with instant previews and histograms, wider dynamic range in raw formats than film why would anyone go back? The latter point sometimes people say benefit is you don't clip highlights in film as easy (which is exposed for shadows due to curved response) but expose for highlights and you can drag shadows up in post since 12 to 14stops of DR in average DSLR file when making files your 8bit files for print/viewing (yeah I know some print is 16bit workflow but that isn't for luma but colour gamut reasons going additive to subtractive system especially since paper is 6 to 7 stops maximum even when highest dmax due to full of OBA's). Those are just the benefits off the top of my head too there are much more and I've not found any drawbacks save for the cost of the change but chemicals for developing are getting more and more expensive so there perhaps isn't even that now.

Re:the smell of E-6 in the morning

[ebvwfbw]

Missing history. Can't find a reference, however the cameras that we sent to the moon were Kodak digitals and that was in 1969. I had this discussion with a guy that worked on the Apollo missions. He said they were all digital cameras. What the NY Times shows is the first patented digital camera.

Re:the smell of E-6 in the morning

[Ol Olsoc]

Based on my limited experience and what I've read, I'd guess it would be possible to make a lab capable of processing Kodachrome (probably not very well) for perhaps $100,000.

Its the maintenance that gets ya.

From the 1950's to the early 1970's there were a number of fly-by-night film and processing companies that did a poor job of making and processing film. I don't look forward to a re-emergence of those conditions.

I'd be surprised if that happened again. Maybe a few regional labs - I'm still asking why they are reviving the stuff to begin with. Even the Super 8 Ektachrome!

Perhaps for some nostalgic purposes, I suppose. But the whole ecosystem under which old-school chemical photography is gone. As well, how much sales and processing is there going to be to support a nostalgia/ post nostalgia item.

Certainly I have my old Nikon bodies sitting around. Maybe some trendy person might want to buy one at the right price. I have an old 8008 that for a prosumer camera was oddly popular with professionals that has very distinguished wear mark personality from all of the use. The F-2 I'll keep for sure. Just trying to figure out just why I'd want to shoot slide fiml any more.

Re:the smell of E-6 in the morning

[RockDoctor]

Ask a musician whether tube amplifiers are not as good as solid state.

Ask a second musician (or your original musician under a different state of hormones or intoxicants) and get a different answer.

Re:the smell of E-6 in the morning

[Ol Olsoc]

My favorite developer was D76, which as it turns out is an inferior developer: it has a long toe caused by borax in the formulation, which eats away at the emulsion before the critical regions that receive the least light are fully developed. The result is muddy dark areas.

I used mostly HC-110, which at the time was an ongoing battle between it and D-76. Even some Rodinal.

Re:the smell of E-6 in the morning

[budgenator]

Ever use the unsharp masking technique on those?

Re:the smell of E-6 in the morning

[budgenator]

IDK, but it wouldn't surprise me, that would be around the time color fashion was shifting back towards more primary colors and less pastels. Some of the avant garde were using Fujichrome, which really makes primary colors pop, many describe it as garish

Re:the smell of E-6 in the morning

[Ol Olsoc]

Ever use the unsharp masking technique on those?

I've used it a couple times, although not on those weld samples.

Re: the smell of E-6 in the morning

[magarity]

As to camera design/manufacturing - isn't it, that most, if not all, of them now have very similar genes of Japanese precision R&D, followed by more economic Asian manufacturing?

Consumer cameras are made in China but professional cameras and lenses are made in Japan and Germany.

Re: the smell of E-6 in the morning

[edis]

Was Kodak focusing and gathering competence on consumer or on professional products, before giving up on digital?

Re:the smell of E-6 in the morning

[Anonymous Coward]

My Nikon D750 begs to differ with you.

Or you can just go to a theater and appreciate the crystal-clear digitally shot/projected movies that come out now, versus a Blu-Ray of Lawrence of Arabia or 2001. Both were shot on great cameras using good films, but the picture still isn't sharp enough to make full use of an HDTV's 1080p resolution. Let alone what you get with 4K digital video.

Re:the smell of E-6 in the morning

[Anonymous Coward]

And the market for large-format film is a niche within a niche.

If you make money from the format, you charge enough to pay for the expensive digital gear. Time is always more expensive than hardware.

Re:the smell of E-6 in the morning

[Anonymous Coward]

The film color and grain patterns that you're so in love with is a form of nostalgia. No kid born from the 90's onward will see it as anything but an annoying flaw.

People used to moan about the lack of grain in digitally shot movies too. But nobody cares anymore because we're used to the new normal. Which is crystal-clear pictures, and much richer thematic coloring. The latter due to the ability of editors to quickly and endlessly tweak a shot's color settings to match the exact feel they want.

Re: the smell of E-6 in the morning

[Anonymous Coward]

And Nikons only record 8-bit video to the internal card, but will send 10-bit video out of the HDMI port.

Fortunately, external video recorders are cheaper than replacing my lens collection with new glass. :)

Re:the smell of E-6 in the morning

[sbjornda]

But the moment you go to medium/large format films and cameras, film can give you something that would probably cost the same as a small car if you tried to find a matching digital camera.

About 5 years ago I did a close comparison of Fujichrome Provia 100f in a Pentax 67 (medium format film, "crop factor" = 0.5) with a Panasonic Lumix GH2 (micro four-thirds sensor, "crop factor" = 2), and found the results to be remarkably similar. Particularly regarding resolution. This was an outdoors environmental portrait shoot with nothing too challenging in dynamic range (which is even more of a challenge for slide film than for digital). That was the point at which I stopped arguing in favour of film with anyone. I still put a few rolls of slide film through my Pentax 67 every year, but I admit to myself that it's for the nostalgia and the challenge challenge, and to keep the old skills alive, not a quest for superior quality.

--
.nosig

Re:the smell of E-6 in the morning

[GuB-42]

All professional photographers that I know of use DSLRs and software post-processing.
There may be some niches where film is used but it is not where the money is.

What's all these funny letters?

[Frosty Piss]

Ãoe...

Re:What's all these funny letters?

[zephvark]

Yeah. Am I the only one seeing "âoeResurgence"? Do I need to adjust my browser settings, or are the editors just clueless... idiots... ok, forget that. It's not like "Slashdot editor" has ever been more or less than an honorary title for "underpaid overseas intern who barely knows English."

Re:What's all these funny letters?

[johannesg]

Those are UTF8, a standard for encoding characters that was designed in 1992. Here you can see a graph showing adoption of UTF8 on the internet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

One might expect nerds to adopt such technical standards before other people, but apparently slashdot is run by posers, not actual nerds.

Re:What's all these funny letters?

[Anonymous Coward]

Real programmers don't use curly quotes and therefore have no need for UTF. Also, real programmers are no quiche eaters.

Re: What's all these funny letters?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, real programmers know the importance of proper semantics, and as such do indeed use curly quotes. Just as they use tabs when indenting, instead of a series of spaces like some schmuck.

Re:What's all these funny letters?

[Anonymous Coward]

Slashdot is an American website. It has not supported Unicode, has no intention of supporting Unicode, and will not support Unicode.

In fact, Slashdot itself has changed hands many times and guess what? The feature of Not Supporting Unicode is among the only things that have NOT changed a bit.

Get used to this brute fact, or go back to your Unicode-loving commie safe space.

Re:What's all these funny letters?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is America. America does not need Unicode. Get over it and move your fringe characters elsewhere.

Re:What's all these funny letters?

[Cmdln Daco]

I'm not sure why we even support lower case on this site. The printhead on my Teletype ASR-33 doesn't have lower case and it works well for communication.

Seven bits should be enough for anybody.

Re:What's all these funny letters?

[ChrisMaple]

5 bits was good enough for Émile Baudot.

Re:What's all these funny letters?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been lurking here for decades and this is a recurrent theme. I've designed some websites or 2 using frameworks and they've always all been UTF8 compatible.
Could someone please explain to us not-so-nerds just WHY slashdot can not support UTF8 with a few simple switches or a one.time conversion process?
What's up?

Re:What's all these funny letters?

[michael_wojcik]

5 bits was good enough for Émile Baudot.

Bah. Using the 16 most-frequent letters in English, ICANWRITEWITHONLIFOUR

SLASHDOTMUCHFASTERNOW

ADIOS

Hell yeah, if you still shoot film.

[Mal-2]

Ektachrome was always a good choice if you had no access to a lab that would do process E-4. Also, the trade-off is color saturation for speed – Kodachrome was nicely saturated and sharp (small grain) but slow while Ektachrome was a stop or two faster at the same sharpness (though still slow compared to print film).

I haven't checked to see if it's still made, but Fujichrome Velvia was the pick if you wanted to work the cooler colors while retaining saturation. It is/was also slow.

Re:Hell yeah, if you still shoot film.

[Brett Buck]

E-4? What are you talking about? E-4 was an earlier process to develop Ektachrome, replacing E-3 sometime in the late 60's-early 70's. Hence the "E". Modern Ektachrome is E-6. When it was around, if you had no access to an E-4 processor, and weren't willing to do it yourself. you couldn't use Ektachrome.

        I think you probab;y meant K-11 or K-12 which were the last two Kodachrome processes. At the time, unless you had to have it overnight, you wanted Kodachrome.

Re:Hell yeah, if you still shoot film.

[Whatsmynickname]

> but Fujichrome Velvia was the pick if you wanted to work the cooler colors

I don't know, Velvia seemed like it rendered things a bit warm to me.

This person feels the same way about Velvia's warmth. I used to love Velvia!

Re:Hell yeah, if you still shoot film.

[Ol Olsoc]

Ektachrome was always a good choice if you had no access to a lab that would do process K-14.

Fixed that for you E-4 was the Ektachrome process used before the superior E-6 process replaced it. K-14 was the process used for Kodachrome. Extremely different processes.

Re:Hell yeah, if you still shoot film.

[tadas]

if you had no access to a lab that would do process E-4

I think you actually mean "Process K14", the Kodachrome process, which involved 1 story high processing machines and a manager with a degree in chemical engineering. E4 processing was what Ektachrome, Agfachrome and Anscochrome used until the late '60s (Kodak) and the mid '70s (everyone else). I remember shooting Agfachrome 50 in the eary '70s, with gorgeous pastels.When Agfa discontinued the E4 Agfachrome 50 and went to Agfachrome 64, an E6 film, I felt like my pictures suddenly turned into clown posters.

Re: Hell yeah, if you still shoot film.

[Anonymous Coward]

Ektachrome was E-6.

Re:Hell yeah, if you still shoot film.

[Mal-2]

I haven't even tracked if it still exists, so it has obviously been a long time since I shot Velvia. I was just going by my own recollection of it not being an ideal portrait film. Good, but not ideal.

Re: Hell yeah, if you still shoot film.

[Mal-2]

Did I not say that? I was attributing E-4 (erroneously) to Kodachrome.

Re:Hell yeah, if you still shoot film.

[budgenator]

I used to process E4 and E6 at home; Ektachrome Infrared was probably the last holdover for the E-4 process.

Fujichrome and stock tip

[ishmaelflood]

Fujichrome was always very blue in my non expert opinion. Anyway, buy silver!

Re:Fujichrome and stock tip

[Pax681]

Fuji's T-grain emulsion is superior to kodak.. as someone who has his City and Guilds(yeah.. that old) and who's first job was in photography... fuji t-grain FTW!
you whipper snappers know nothing! :P

Re:Fujichrome and stock tip

[Zemran]

Always hated the colours with Fuji and only really loved Kodachrome. I am not going to rush out and buy an OM1 until they bring back Kodachrome :D So many years spent taking photos and yes, I have City and Guilds as well :P in computer graphics :P (yes they did have computers in the 80s) so I should really be cheering for the other side but I know that graphics on a web page and photography are two different subjects.

Re:Fujichrome and stock tip

[Pax681]

i remember when ilford fp400 was xp400! I worked at a govt Research place in Scotland and we had a GREAT set up and i got spoiled for kit between Nikon f3's, hassleblad's for medium format and the classic 5x4 tech cameras. With our studio being part of the maintainance building we had our own custom studio kit.
Then I joined the army as a photographer... the kit at the Joint School of [photography(Now the Defence School of Photography) at RAF Cosford was erm.. pretty fucking basic and the first month they issues you something s;lightly better than a box brownie.. i shit you not! Second month you got a nikon f3 and hassleblads cm550's again. I LOVED darkroom work. i am no setting up a home darkroom. It's just getting hold of a decent colour enlarger and a big ass black out blind for the kitchen and i'm sorted!

Re:Fujichrome and stock tip

[jenningsthecat]

Fujichrome was always very blue in my non expert opinion.

Actually, Fujichrome favoured green. Many people don't realize this, but back in the day the colours on boxes of major-brand slide film were a reliable indicator of what colour they favoured. Ektachrome had blue colouring on its otherwise Kodak-yellow box, and favoured blue. Agfachrome boxes were orange, and when their adverts touted 'better blues begin with orange', they weren't talking just about the orange colour associated with Agfa - they were alluding to the slight orange shift in their film which, because it was complementary to blue, made that colour snap a little more. And of course, Fujichrome boxes were green - IIRC the photos in their ads leaned toward shots with lots of foliage in the background. And Kodachrome, (known for its brilliant, saturated colour), favoured reds just slightly - as indicated by the red accents on the otherwise Kodak-yellow box.

Re:Fujichrome and stock tip

[Ol Olsoc]

Fuji's T-grain emulsion is superior to kodak.. as someone who has his City and Guilds(yeah.. that old) and who's first job was in photography... fuji t-grain FTW!

But it's color was garish.

Re:Fujichrome and stock tip

[Pax681]

Fuji's T-grain emulsion is superior to kodak.. as someone who has his City and Guilds(yeah.. that old) and who's first job was in photography... fuji t-grain FTW!

But it's color was garish.

one man's garish is another man's vivid.
for work with long focal length and tele-convertors I'd take t-grain over kodak film any day of the week bud ;) Also if you used their 600 film and uprated it to 3200 , popped on a soft focus filter and processed it as 3200 you got pastel portraits the easy way.. they were quite popular in the 80's

Re:Fujichrome and stock tip

[Ol Olsoc]

Fuji's T-grain emulsion is superior to kodak.. as someone who has his City and Guilds(yeah.. that old) and who's first job was in photography... fuji t-grain FTW!

But it's color was garish.

one man's garish is another man's vivid.

I wonder if maybe that's why there were different types of film?

What was your field? I was doing mostly industrial work, and set work when we needed publicity stuff.

Re:Fujichrome and stock tip

[Anonymous Coward]

Velvia 50 favors green
Velvia 100 favors blue.
Ektar (reversal film, not transparancy) favors red.

If there is a Kodachrome replacement, it's Ektar.

Re:Fujichrome and stock tip

[Anonymous Coward]

Agfachrome boxes were orange, and when their adverts touted 'better blues begin with orange', they weren't talking just about the orange colour associated with Agfa - they were alluding to the slight orange shift in their film which, because it was complementary to blue, made that colour snap a little more.

So that's where the dirty little buggers get it from.
http://www.slashfilm.com/orang...

Re:Fujichrome and stock tip

[ChrisMaple]

Anscochrome came in a bright red box. GAF claimed the film was balanced for 6500K (or 6000K?) light, which implies that images would come out redder than the Kodak film balanced for 5500K. I don't recall any difference in color balance, but I never tied to compare them.

Re:Fujichrome and stock tip

[jenningsthecat]

Anscochrome came in a bright red box. GAF claimed the film was balanced for 6500K (or 6000K?) light, which implies that images would come out redder than the Kodak film balanced for 5500K. I don't recall any difference in color balance, but I never tied to compare them.

GAF - now there's a company I haven't thought of in a long time! I think one of my film development tanks was made by them. I don't think I ever used their film though.

The differences in colour balance among brands and types wasn't pronounced, and you'd probably only be certain of the differences if you shot the same scene at the same exposure with more than one type, then compared the results. And that assumes consistent, professional film processing - variations in process and chemistry could result in pretty large variations.

Why not Kodachrome?

[93 Escort Wagon]

After all, it gives us such nice bright colors,
It gives us the dreams of summer,
It makes all the world a sunny day.
Oh, yeah.

But maybe they're worried mamma will just take the Kodachrome away (again).

Re:Why not Kodachrome?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because the processing is too complex vs. E-6 to justify any perceived advantage.

Re:Why not Kodachrome?

[dreamchaser]

Whoosh.

Re:Why not Kodachrome?

[Anonymous Coward]

Simon says, I want my Kodachrome!

Re:Why not Kodachrome?

[theodp]

Mama don't take my Kodachrome
Leave your boy so far from home
Mama don't take my Kodachrome away

Re:Why not Kodachrome?

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably lots of pictures of Carrie Fisher too.

Re:Why not Kodachrome?

[93 Escort Wagon]

Shoot - it's actually "greens" of summer. I've been mishearing that since the 70s.

Guess I should've taken advantage of the Internet before posting, eh? ;-)

Madness

[Anonymous Coward]

On one side there are these hipster morons who think analog is somehow better than digital in any way, and on the other hand there are the color-grading "teal-and-orange" nitwits. Where have all the sane people gone?

Re:Madness

[Anonymous Coward]

They're normal people, ignoring the discussion; or outside, taking pictures with their cameras & generally not giving too many fucks about.

Re: Madness

[Anonymous Coward]

> hipster morons

Fuck off. Why are people not allowed to have hobbies and have fun?

Re: Madness

[Anonymous Coward]

I wrote "hipster morons who think analog is somehow better than digital in any way". I stand by that.

Re:Madness

[Anonymous Coward]

No matter how you cut the cake, photos are all analogue when you look at them.

Formats?

[kirthn]

I wonder if they will do this for the 120, 220, 4x5, 8x10....or only 35 mm...

Especially in the medium format resolution is still higher and there are only croppped digital medium format-sensors

looking forward in any case!

Re:Formats?

[Anonymous Coward]

When Kodak came out of bankruptcy they announced that film production was being rebuilt because of the demand from the movie industry and professional photography. So sheet film has been around... I know because I have been shooting 4x5 for almost half a century. And 120 never went away. The new emulsions are finer grain and more stable than ever. What is new about this announcement is that they have resumed 35mm slide film production.

My cellphone does a wonderful job of taking snapshots... and my Olympus is a terrific travel camera. But if I get the urge to capture a landscape with enormous ranges of brightness and detail at various depths its hard to beat the simplicity and robustness of 20 square inches of film and a view camera.

Re:Formats?

[Anonymous Coward]

"...its hard to beat the simplicity and robustness of 20 square inches of film and a view camera."
. ...Unless it's 80 square inches and no camera... and no Light...
We, (I had a little help...), actually developed the Tech. Not puny Photons, but Protons, and later right up to 209Bi Nuclei. Accelerate a Bunch of them, ("Bunching" has a particular and specific meaning here...), and expose a sheet of Kodak X-Ray Film for anywhere between several seconds and ~2 Nanoseconds, depending on Dosimetry, at the end of the Beamline, and then run the sheet through a unique, in the truest sense of the word, Kodak X-Ray Film Developer. Only one was ever made.
Whether the Dosage was a few Nuclei a second, or a few Billion, we had it sussed out.
But Why?
To this day, there is no substitute for Film in this application. Nobody makes 8X10 inch Sensors, and if they did, those Sensors would soon be ruined.
We would evaluate the Dosimetry under a Scanner, (A Scanner here means a device that a Scanner, a Person, uses.), for uniformity over a specified field, typically a six inch circle. Many Accelerator quirks can make uniformity, ununiform.
For important Runs, we might go through a hundred exposures before The Experiment.

It isn't enough that the chips in the Birds overhead are toughened against SEU; we could evaluate entire Boards, and how all those separate Chips interact when... attacked. Theoretically by Solar Storms.
But by a curious Historical Accident, this wasn't any Star Wars scenario. It was started by John Lawrence, the brother of Ernest O. There are decades-long experiments ongoing in Evolutionary Biology. When DNA gets zapped, which happens all the time, how many Generations does it take to diverge into a producing a new Species? Current estimates are between a thousand and ten thousand Reproductive Cycles.

In my waning years, I have kept a few mementos. I have kept a few exposures of Starbursts. This is when, under the Scanner, a Nuclear Reaction takes place in the Emulsion and is visible. These Nuclear processes continued until the Kodak Film Developer froze them.

Captcha: labored

Re:Formats?

[Anonymous Coward]

If nobody makes 8x10 images sensors, then what the heck are the x-ray technicians at my local clinic using?

They put a large (larger than 8x10), plastic-covered sensor wherever they want the image, expose it to x-rays, and it transmits the image wirelessly to the computer in the lead-lined booth.

What's next?

[Anonymous Coward]

Vinyl instead of CD?

Re:What's next?

[Cmdln Daco]

Real music, instead of just listening to recordings of other people playing & singing.

Well fuck unicode, amiright?

[wonkey_monkey]

âoeThe reintroduction [...] a resurgence in shooting film,â Kodak Alaris says. âoeResurgence [...] physical end product.â

Jesus fucking Christ, Slashdot. It's 2017.

At they very, very least, you should code something that warns of accented characters before publication. It'd take two minutes to write.

I thought you were trying to be a professional news service, but you come across like an absolute shower of useless berks..

Re:Well fuck unicode, amiright?

[RoccamOccam]

It's part of the resurgence of ASCII-only websites - produces a warmer tone of text.

Re:Well fuck unicode, amiright?

[drinkypoo]

I thought you were trying to be a professional news service, but you come across like an absolute shower of useless berks..

ISTR our new overlord promising working Unicode support. Did I hallucinate that?

Re:Well fuck unicode, amiright?

[Anonymous Coward]

Slashdot is an American website. It follows American customs and reflect American views and has a rational pro-America bias.

In America, we use ASCII. You do realize that the A in ASCII stands for American, don't you?

Americans do not aim at Unicode-correctness. If someone submits story content with funny characters in it, the joke is on him, not us.

Don't like it? Don't read it.

Re:Well fuck unicode, amiright?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, ASCII is fine and all, but for real mainframe feel, you would need EBCDIC...

Re:Well fuck unicode, amiright?

[Anonymous Coward]

unicode = metric!

Re:Well fuck unicode, amiright?

[Eravnrekaree]

It would be very easy to do given Perls elegant UTF-8 support (using conversion functions or open() flags). It converts to and from Perls internal wide character support.

Re:Well fuck unicode, amiright?

[wonkey_monkey]

12 hours later and you still haven't fixed it. Just don't give a shit, eh.

Re:Well fuck unicode, amiright?

[tlhIngan]

Jesus fucking Christ, Slashdot. It's 2017.

At they very, very least, you should code something that warns of accented characters before publication. It'd take two minutes to write.

I thought you were trying to be a professional news service, but you come across like an absolute shower of useless berks.

Actually, /. supports Unicode just fine. But since Unicode has many issues for websites, especially ones that take and display arbitrary user input, /. implements a rather stringent filter.

In fact, most websites don't bother with a filter, resulting in a big mess in comment sections as trolls start playing around. Many sites even let you enter the RTL override codes that suddenly reverse all the text. And plenty of web browsers and websites miscalculate how much space stacked character modifiers take up, so a one line comment can create such a mess that the comment section is obliterated, and maybe even the article itself too. /.'s filter is far more strict, allowing pretty much just the printable ASCII character maps,Though it's probably implemented in a lame way (bit masking every character which destroys the high bit and thus rendering multibyte codepoints as individual characters.

But the code is actually UTF-8 safe and the reason we have it today is because of the trolling that went on when support was actually added. In fact, only 5 years ago did /. actually add the filter to the OUTPUT of the database too, so there was a time you could see the crap people did. It's still known to Google, though, if you search for the somewhat odd ": erocS" or "5 :erocS" string. Hint: RTL override makes that readable.

Artistic control?

[thegarbz]

A lot of people have rose coloured glasses on when they look back at the days of film. The artistic control line is a classic example of this. If you want artistic control then nothing ultimately beats being able to play with pixels on a screen. For everyone except the top of professionals and the most serious of dark room hobbyists, what did artistic control mean?

- Buy one brand of film, take a photo, take it to a lab, let a computer decide how it should look and develop.
- Buy another brand of film, take a photo, take it to a lab, let a computer decide how it should look and develop.

or if you have a lot of money:
- Buy another brand of film, take a photo, take it to a lab, let a lab jockey manually decide how it should look and develop.

The same argument comes in digital editing. Purists would say that if you manipulate the RAW file on the computer it isn't like film because film was pure. They fail to reaslise that all they did in the past was pay someone else to manipulate their pictures for them. These are also the same people who complain digital doesn't look as good as film so now I just let them wallow in their own misery.

Re:Artistic control?

[BlackHawk-666]

You're missing the fact that you can actually develop the film at home in your own darkroom, and have total control over the type of film, the chemicals used to develop it, the temperature of the chemical baths, under and over exposure, push processing and cross processing. Sure, most of these decisions have to be made in advance and apply to a while roll at a time, but 120 film on a 6x7 camera is only about 10 shots. Better yet, using a frame camera you shot individual shots on massive pieces of film and can develop it exactly the way you want.

Once you have the negative developed, it's child's play to scan it into a PC and do anything that could be done to a digital photo. Alternatively, spend a few hours in the darkroom developing prints the old fashioned way. You have quite a lot of control at the print making stage, from dodging and burning, contrast filters, toners (sepia, chocolate, etc)

Re:Artistic control?

[drinkypoo]

You have quite a lot of control at the print making stage, from dodging and burning, contrast filters, toners (sepia, chocolate, etc)

All of which is a massive pain in the ass compared to digital, which lets you do all the same stuff. And you can dodge without making tape flags, and you can burn without making masks (or even putting a hole in a piece of paper and waving it around.) If I never have to rotate another tape flag every thirty seconds it'll be too soon.

Re:Artistic control?

[Brett Buck]

Actually, you are generally correct (disregarding some minor technical misstatements). With any color process, the control was very strictly limited. Even Ansel Adams never resolved this issue and never did very much with color, because you really can't control it, and for certain, most of what you can do if you try is screw it up. For color print film, you can do some *very limited* control, but mostly all you can do it make the color be off. In the specific case of slide film there is virtually no control whatsoever possible. You can underexpose or overexpose it, but aside from that, forget it. Unless you get it scanned and use Photoshop.

Digital, as you note, more or less resolves that limitation for color, you actually can manipulated it to come out the way you envision with great ease. If you only ever use 35mm, digital has exceeded it in quality as well. For the vast majority of people, digital in the usual 2/3 frame or full-frame 35mm format is FAR, FAR better quality than an amateur could get with common processes and actual 35mm film. Crappy cell phone cameras with sensors the size of a few grains of rice usually do better, too. There's still nothing digital available to amateurs for sane money that can match larger-format film. and I expect that the 120 and 4x5 formats will outlast 35mm.

      The wrong part is what happens when you take film to a lab - there were and are essentially *no* computer-based evaluation steps in slide processing. They run it through a fixed process (E-6 in this case, as noted elsewhere, or K-12 for Kodachrome) and it comes out however it comes out. There were some weird second exposures and some hand manipulation required for Kodachrome which is why there were only two processing facilities in the entire world for many years, and for the last 10 years, only one place to process it You live in Botswana and want your roll of Kodachrome 64 processed? It went to Dwayne's photo in Kansas.

Re:Artistic control?

[thegarbz]

You're missing the fact that you can actually develop the film at home in your own darkroom

No I'm not missing anything, in fact I specifically mentioned it.

But the reality is people didn't do it. Amateurs didn't, professional people didn't, those people who did were extreme hobbyists, pioneers in their field, or some of the most revered photographic artists who have books published about them.

The darkroom provided an amazing amount of artistic control, but the number of people who used it were a pittance of the entire photographic industry.

Re:Artistic control?

[thegarbz]

there were and are essentially *no* computer-based evaluation steps in slide processing.

In the negative / slide development phase you're absolutely right. But the vast majority of photos did not stop there. There was a significant amount of adjustment in the step that went through to final print, previously that was human, but towards the end of what could be called the era of print film it was definitely automated by a computer.

Re:Artistic control?

[IMightB]

Cant really do home processing with Kodachrome evidently, the process is extremely complex.

Pensioners Sell Film

[Going_Digital]

Kodak sold the film division to U.K. Kodak Pension Plan (KPP), or rather handed over control in return for debt write off. So now the pensioners can buy film for their cameras and support their own pension plan.

Digital isn't all that great

[Anonymous Coward]

As I photography who grew up on film, darkrooms, and chemicals. I think a sense of magic has gone away from photography. Now you just load images into a computer and Photoshop does the rest. It's probably why vinyl records and audio tape has never truly gone away for audio enthusiasts. Or why the Polaroid camera made a nostalgic comeback of sorts. Digital is more convenient and in some ways better. But photography is art, and vision and to me digital takes away some of the experience of making it happen when digital is used.

Re:Digital isn't all that great

[Anonymous Coward]

I think a sense of magic has gone away from photography.

It makes no sense to speak of a thing "having gone away" when it has never been there.

More than just a fad

[PuddleBoy]

While I'm not gonna run out and buy some Ektachrome, I do shoot with B&W film on a regular basis. And there are enough of us out here that, for example, a shop can exist here (Blue Moon Camera) that sells *exclusively* to film users. There is not any hint of digital in their shop. And sometimes, the place is hopping with customers.

There are many non-USA manufacturers of film and paper still out there - amazingly, there are still choices.

There are also many informal groups that meet to share prints, ideas, knowledge, experiences, etc. And no, it's not just three guys reminiscing about the good old days - there are 20, 30, 40, 50 60 -somethings who get involved.

It's not just about the result. It's also about the process. Film is slower and more deliberate - you tend to take a few moments longer to think about the shot. You're also more deliberate in printing the final result. I have pro-level film and digital gear - what I use that day depends on how I feel and what the subject lends itself to. I value that choice.

Film will be with us for decades to come. Will it last another century? Possibly not. But it still has years to go.

Kodachrome isn't coming back...

[Ellis D. Tripp]

Kodachrome will never come back because of the immense complexity of the K-14 developing process compared with E-6 or C-41. By the time Kodachrome was discontinued, there was only ONE lab that was still able to process it, and the required chemicals were discontinued by Kodak along with the film stock.

The automatic processing machines have all hit the scrapyards, and manual processing of Kodachrome was never done AFAIK, due to the extremely tight temperature and timing requirements.

Re:Kodachrome isn't coming back...

[dgatwood]

Also, IIRC, Ektachrome was Kodak's only slide film, and maybe there's a resurgence in slide projectors.... :-D

Re:Kodachrome isn't coming back...

[Anonymous Coward]

Kodachrome IS (or more accurately was) also a slide film

Re:Kodachrome isn't coming back...

[Anonymous Coward]

Kodachrome was a slide film, and slide film was often generally the preferred film for publication because of greater shadow (or was it highlight) detail, color accuracy, etc. Plus you could use a light box and loupe to evaluate slides quickly. Actual projection wasn't that common.

Re:Kodachrome isn't coming back...

[EvilSS]

The automatic processing machines have all hit the scrapyards, and manual processing of Kodachrome was never done AFAIK, due to the extremely tight temperature and timing requirements.

One crazy aussie managed to do it. But he was a pro working in a professional photo lab and did it to see if he could. It was apparently a pain in the ass.

Tube amplifiers are PART of the instrument...

[Ellis D. Tripp]

Musicians using tube amps makes sense, as the particular distortion of a pair of overdriven 6L6s is a huge part of the characteristic rock/blues "sound". The amplifier and it's distortion characteristics are an inherent part of the sound the player is trying to create.

For REPRODUCTION of recorded music, the ideal amplifier would be a "piece of wire with gain", adding or subtracting nothing from the original signal except to increase it in level to drive speakers or headphones. This is where the use of tube amplifiers (especially the ridiculous audiophool stuff using single ended triodes and no negative feedback) can only DETRACT from the signal as the musician intended it to be heard.

Tube amps are cool in their own right, and many of them are physically beautiful pieces of "functional artwork", but they are not "magical" by any means. It just happens that the particular type of odd-order harmonic distortion created by tubes happens to sound OK to many people. But it IS distortion, and technically is unwanted in REPRODUCING recorded content.

Re:Tube amplifiers are PART of the instrument...

[PopeRatzo]

Tube amps are cool in their own right, and many of them are physically beautiful pieces of "functional artwork", but they are not "magical" by any means. It just happens that the particular type of odd-order harmonic distortion created by tubes happens to sound OK to many people. But it IS distortion, and technically is unwanted in REPRODUCING recorded content.

Tube mic preamps are pretty magical, for production. Just as film is magical for photo production.

But you are absolutely correct about reproduction.

Kodak was always screwed

[rsilvergun]

because no matter what they did they were stuck switching from a pay per use model (film) to a one time purchase (digital). When I was a kid I paid for each and every picture because film was a physical media I bought. I don't do that with digital. Sure, in the 90s and early 2000s I had to buy flash ram. But it didn't take long for increases in space, better compression and faster mobile internet. Even if I'm a pro I can just pony up for 512 mb SSDs and portable 2 tb hard drives.

There's _always_ more money in selling people supplies than product. The razor blade model is what everybody wants. Kodak lost that, and with it their fortunes.

Photographers know and care squat about digital te

[Qbertino]

I'm pretty much on the side of the crowd here in this thread stating that you can emulate basically anything analog with digital photography with the right equipment, software and knowlege.

Knowlege being the problem here. As with anything, going digital requires a discrete intermediate step of understanding the basic principles of digital and neccessary abstractions involved. Precisely this is the deal-breaker.

Photographers generally don't care about color-depth data, sensor build, data throughput, the pitfalls of digital editing and all that.

Yes, you can do just about anything with digital tech, yet one of the best animation films of 2016 (Kubo) is made with super-old-school stop-motion. Force the crew to do the same enirely in a 3D pipeline and all the artists would rather kill themselves than do it.

I see this in my work everyday. I'm the sole IT expert in a crew of ~30 communicators and marketeers. We do our customer list in Excel because the marketing boss doesn't want to waste 5 minutes wrapping his head around the dead and abstact concept of a CRM system and an accompaning pipeline. It's basically the very same problem.

Film is real, digital is abstract and disconnected from this world. There may be a Hasselblad Digicam and a Mac Pro and Adobe PS luxury pack that does all this and more and better, but the sheer massive amount of digital pipeline and IT scaffolding such a technology needs makes a creatives brain hurt.

Thats the reason people use feature phones, moleskines and get all warm and fuzzy inside when they see vinyl rotating on the turntable. It's way less a pain in the but and far more real and sensual. I felt the same dancing Tango to a mechanical Gramophone a few months back. And it's the reason I'm cutting short on my computer time and just now bought what is basically a CLI-centric Linux Netbook rather than the new MB Pro.

More and more I come to the conclusion that I can't really blame them. Not everybody is an obsessive Nerd like we are and can wrap is head around digital as we can, because we do nothing else.

My 2 cents.

This is a good discussion for slashdot

[Anonymous Coward]

Not some gay shit about twitter or some politician

nostalgia

[Anonymous Coward]

i'll bet we see a resurgence in 8-track cassettes too.

E6 or C41?

[Anonymous Coward]

E6 Ektachrome does make color slides, but they are certainly not the outstanding Kodachrome.
Not sure if they have a market advantage over digital other than nostalga.

C41 is another color process that is still around.
On this process, if you want slides, you can start with negative file and print to make a positive.

You can still buy the negative film (Kodacolor).
Can you still get the film to print onto?

How would the results compare to Ektachrome or Kodachrome?

Perhaps, instead of starting up another film process, someone has started up a service to make slides this way?

Film interest growing?

[real gumby]

Resurgence in the popularity of analog photography has created demand for new and old film products alike.

Yes, from a very low number to a slightly less low number, as with vinyl audio. Counterexample: Keeble and Schuchat photography in Palo Alto (perhaps the only remaining place on the peninsula where you could get film developed or buy pro gear) just went out of business in November.

Re: Film interest growing?

[Anonymous Coward]

There is still a tiny shop in downtown San Jose by city hall that does in-house B&W, C41, and E6 processing.

Ektachrome is crap

[Anonymous Coward]

Ektachrome was good for fast cheap processing, and faster film speeds. Maybe good for weekly magazines, sports, advertising, stuff like that. The king was Kodachrome. Kodachrome had a much wider dynamic range than Ektachrome, and probably wider than any scanner available to digitize it. In addition, it had and has tremendous archival properties. Kodachrome slides easily last 50 years (if kept in the dark in moderately reasonable conditions, not museum conditions). Ektachrome fades after a few years.

These days I don't see any advantage of Ektachrome over a good digital camera. There may be other films that still have some advantage, but not Ektachrome. Kodachrome still does better than digital. Maybe with really good HDR, that advantage will fade. Kodachrome, btw, had the equivalent of about 50 megapixels per frame, and did not have aliasing problems, due to randomness of grain. The dyes used also probably had better visual characteristics than most computer monitors.

Still prefer film.

[jpellino]

But it's very hard to do now. Why do I find it better? (1) you have 24 or 36 shots on a roll - you tend to compose more carefully. (2) Unless you're shooting raw, you have greater latitude with what you can get out of a negative (made of atoms that are relatively hard to ruin) compared to a digital shot (made of electrons that you can make go poof with one wrong finger press). Sunsets for me are the kicker. I have film shots of sunsets that are still gorgeous 30 years later, and that I can reprint and tweak and find certain highlights in. Digital sunset shots include blowouts that you can never recover from. And before some of you start, it's no more old fashioned than reading print materials or building things out of wood.

Nice to see support for film

[keithostertag]

Even though I don't often use color slide film this is good news because it is one more sign that film usage is increasing. This will help prevent film from deteriorating to the level of a boutique item. And really, all you guys that think digital is exactly the same or "better" than film just don't know what you are talking about, probably because you don't really care. Each format has its strengths and weaknesses, and supporters and detractors.

Everything old is new again

[eric_harris_76]

First vinyl records and tube amps. Then somebody started manufacturing Nixie displays. Now this.

What next? Carburetors? Gold standard? Sock hops? Hoop skirts?