Any successful attempts at developing Kodachrome at home?

[Dimas]

That was probably AU$, but still - whether it's $200AUD or $150USD, it's a moot point. Unless you are able to set up processing in volumes similar to what the K-Labs did back in the day, nobody is going to pay that much per roll to develop it because you won't be able to get the unit cost for the chemistry down to a reasonable price point.

Yeah, that $200 price tag is clearly insanely inflated. It honestly sounds like a classic 'go-away' price—basically his way of saying, 'I am only going to drop everything else in my life to process Kodachrome if you pay me an absolutely ridiculous amount of money.

 

[thinkbrown]

'I am only going to drop everything else in my life to process Kodachrome if you pay me an absolutely ridiculous amount of money.

An entirely fair take tbh

 

[MattKing]

As the late Ron Mowrey @Photo Engineer hear on Photrio posted many times, the Kodachrome approach had reached its theoretical zenith, and the inherent weaknesses of the technology meant that it had been surpassed with respect to colour fidelity by the more modern E6 based approaches.
Ron was one of the co-holders of one of the primary patents behind the final K-14 Kodachrome process, and was an employee of Eastman Kodak for many years.
And Kodachrome only made sense when it was used for motion picture volumes.
The standard Kodachrome processing runs developed a mile of spliced together customer film at a time. The machines were incredibly impressive - large as a small bus, and very loud. At the Kodak Canada Kodachrome processing lab where my Dad was customer service manager for 23 years, during busy times of the year, the Kodachrome machine ran 24 hours a day - the people on pre-splice, technicians running the processing machines and the people handling the processed film, all worked in shifts of eight hour each.
When home movies essentially disappeared in favour of amateur video, Kodachrome's days were numbered.

 

[blee1996]

The main challenge with Kodachrome process is that you need to re-expose the film to different color light during development process, and then do color coupling per layer. On the other hand, this might give alternative process people to go wild at each layer.

 

[TheFlyingCamera]

Yeah, that $200 price tag is clearly insanely inflated. It honestly sounds like a classic 'go-away' price—basically his way of saying, 'I am only going to drop everything else in my life to process Kodachrome if you pay me an absolutely ridiculous amount of money.

No, I don't think it was that. That was the actual cost per roll TO HIM - he wasn't doing it for anyone else at that point.

 

[Dimas]

As the late Ron Mowrey @Photo Engineer hear on Photrio posted many times, the Kodachrome approach had reached its theoretical zenith, and the inherent weaknesses of the technology meant that it had been surpassed with respect to colour fidelity by the more modern E6 based approaches.
Ron was one of the co-holders of one of the primary patents behind the final K-14 Kodachrome process, and was an employee of Eastman Kodak for many years.
And Kodachrome only made sense when it was used for motion picture volumes.
The standard Kodachrome processing runs developed a mile of spliced together customer film at a time. The machines were incredibly impressive - large as a small bus, and very loud. At the Kodak Canada Kodachrome processing lab where my Dad was customer service manager for 23 years, during busy times of the year, the Kodachrome machine ran 24 hours a day - the people on pre-splice, technicians running the processing machines and the people handling the processed film, all worked in shifts of eight hour each.
When home movies essentially disappeared in favour of amateur video, Kodachrome's days were numbered.

Ron Mowrey is an absolute legend, and his contributions to this forum are deeply missed. He was completely right—from a strict engineering standpoint, E6 is objectively superior in color fidelity.
But I'm not chasing clinical perfection or commercial viability. It's about the unique aesthetic, the history, and the sheer challenge of reverse-engineering a legendary process. We obviously can't build a bus-sized machine to process a mile of film, which is exactly why this has to be approached as a completely inefficient, small-batch, one-shot chemical experiment. It’s not about competing with E6; it’s about the adventure!

 

[Dimas]

The main challenge with Kodachrome process is that you need to re-expose the film to different color light during development process, and then do color coupling per layer. On the other hand, this might give alternative process people to go wild at each layer.

Exactly! Finding and exploring those hidden possibilities within the multi-layer film is exactly what makes this whole project so fascinating.

 

[Dimas]

No, I don't think it was that. That was the actual cost per roll TO HIM - he wasn't doing it for anyone else at that point.

But honestly, if $200 was just his raw material cost per roll, that is even more insane! It completely proves the point we discussed earlier: trying to source or synthesize the original OEM chemistry is an absolute financial dead end. It just confirms that using alternative, readily available couplers is the only viable way forward for a project like this today.

 

[BurntOutElectronics]

As the late Ron Mowrey @Photo Engineer hear on Photrio posted many times, the Kodachrome approach had reached its theoretical zenith, and the inherent weaknesses of the technology meant that it had been surpassed with respect to colour fidelity by the more modern E6 based approaches.
Ron was one of the co-holders of one of the primary patents behind the final K-14 Kodachrome process, and was an employee of Eastman Kodak for many years.
And Kodachrome only made sense when it was used for motion picture volumes.
The standard Kodachrome processing runs developed a mile of spliced together customer film at a time. The machines were incredibly impressive - large as a small bus, and very loud. At the Kodak Canada Kodachrome processing lab where my Dad was customer service manager for 23 years, during busy times of the year, the Kodachrome machine ran 24 hours a day - the people on pre-splice, technicians running the processing machines and the people handling the processed film, all worked in shifts of eight hour each.
When home movies essentially disappeared in favour of amateur video, Kodachrome's days were numbered.

It wasn't so much it's theoretical zenith, more that Kodak didn't find the investment in updating the process viable and so for the last couple of decades Kodachrome wasn't updated whilst E6 saw massive change.
It was an economical dead end, not a technical one.
It does make me wonder what a film of that nature could achieve today, you'd probably just have to set aside almost all environmental regulations

 

[BurntOutElectronics]

That was probably AU$, but still - whether it's $200AUD or $150USD, it's a moot point. Unless you are able to set up processing in volumes similar to what the K-Labs did back in the day, nobody is going to pay that much per roll to develop it because you won't be able to get the unit cost for the chemistry down to a reasonable price point.

Yep, the volume wasn't there a decade ago when he spoke about it, certainly isn't there now and on top of that all the film is very old.

Kodachrome undergoes a magenta shift as it ages, even frozen stuff from the 2000's is going to be like that now

 

[MattKing]

It was more than economics - it was the nature of the structure and the technical realities inherent in the approach, along with the limitations of the available constituent components.
The problems that were inherent in Kodachrome had been solved with the E6 films, so attempting to find complex work-arounds when simpler ones existed and were already on the market meant that it made no sense to try.
It was always best suited to high volumes, and those economics were its great strength in its heyday, while being its death knell at the end, but its reputation was based more on associated memories than its comparative (to modern Ektachrome) qualities when it reached its end.