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

[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

[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

[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: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).

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.