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

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: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: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.

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.

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: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. :-)