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

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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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.

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: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.

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?

[dreamchaser]

Whoosh.

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: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.

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

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: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