A brief history of Kodachrome

[markbau]

I really hope they'll be able to achieve an E-6 Kodachrome, I never got to shoot it since I'm quite young, but I love the colors of the several Kodachrome II my grandpa shot in the 50s, would love to shoot it myself. I dont think K-14 will come back however

Kodachrome certainly had a distinct "look" and in its day was head and shoulders above the competition but time moved on. I started using it in about 1978 but once I started doing Cibachromes I realised its inherent high contrast was not really suitable for Cibachromes without mucking around with contrast reduction masks. I changed to Fuji slide film and never looked back. The Fuji was just as sharp, beautiful, to my eye, colour rendition but didn't have Kodachrome's habit of completely blocking up shadows unless you got the exposure perfect, come to think of it, even when you nailed exposure it could do bad things to shadows. Kodachrome could over emphasise reds and never did handle greens particularly well. If you got the amateur version it could have a distinctive green cast if it was very fresh. Anyway, it's never coming back but just thought I'd give some real life experience with it. That said, of all my slides, I love scanning Kodachromes the best, as long as there is some detail in the shadows. Kodachrome's sharpness was extraordinary.

 

[George Mann]

Hey, maybe they will bring Kodachrome back!

The engineers that created Kodachrome lived in a world that deserved it. This world does not!

 

[Sirius Glass]

The engineers that created Kodachrome lived in a world that deserved it. This world does not!

Now if we want to talk about a real color slide film, then the subject is Ektachrome.