Film from Italy -- Ferrania starting production 2014

wblynch · Sep 7, 2014

cmacd123 said:
Other notes:

The Solaris colour negative films were masked could negatives designed to print on the "Kodak Channel" of a photofinishing colour printing machine. I could not imagine any reason why anyone would make an Unmasked colour negative for pictorial use..

Yes, but are there really any Kodak channel photofinishing color printing machines left in operation? Scanners don't really need a mask. The reason I can imagine is the same stock can be used for negatives and transparencies.

Truzi · Sep 7, 2014

Rudeofus said:
A machine needed for making $widget has a controller which runs on an 80386 computer under MSDOS. That machine has been flaky lately ...

If it ran under MSDOS, it always ran flaky

Ken Nadvornick · Sep 7, 2014

I dunno'... Those INT 21h services were pretty darned solid. Mostly because they and the hardware they acted on were so simple in that single-tasking environment. In fact, even the true bugs were solid and well known.

The fact that executing an x86 ret command failed to pop the BP register, thus guaranteeing a corrupted stack frame, was so well known, and already worked around, that MS left it enshrined in the APIs all the way through the early kernel versions of Windows. Fixing it would have broken years of previous applications.

Ken

Dr Croubie · Sep 7, 2014

Ken Nadvornick said:
* Does anyone remember the stunningly beautiful SkyGlobe planetarium program by Mark Haney of KlassM** Software? This would have been in the late 80s to early 90s, when men were men and software was pure opcodes and chip-level programming.

I may even have that still somewhere on a non-floppy floppy disk (you know, the 3.5 inch 'hard' floppies).
I've got 3 VMs running under my Linux: Win7 I just installed, got my scanner with Silverfast, R3000 printer, and Canon DPP. Vista is the latest to support Mitsubishi GX developer (PLC programming), and Win2000 to use Mitsubishi GT works (PLC screen programming).

It sure beats my old setup, I had an old 386 to run 386 stuff off 3.5" and 5.25" floppies, a 5x86 running some sweet games, and my P2-350 accessing all my old scsi drives. Cabling and KVM switches were a nightmare. Plus an Atari ST to run Leisure Suit Larry off of 5 floppy disks. I must get that setup and play it again.

What's this got to do with Ferrania again? Their coating machines run on VirtualBox too?

ME Super · Sep 7, 2014

Yes, VMs are how they do it, though sometimes the source code is available too, so the application can be ported to the new environment. An example of the latter is the game "Dungeons of Daggorath," which was originally written for the TRS-80 Color Computer, which used a Motorola 6809 processor (the predecessor of the Motorola 68000). The company that created it went out of business, but the president of the company made the source code available. An individual bought a copy of the code and ported it to Windows, so now it's possible to play this old game without a buggy TRS-80 emulator (essentially another type of VM).

And yes, you can run old 16-bit MS-DOS applications on Windows 7 as well.

Rudeofus · Sep 7, 2014

Ken Nadvornick said:
All true. And given Ferrania's impending "big announcement" in a couple of weeks, my guess is that they have already identified, researched, and then either mitigated or signed off on all of these risks. And probably many, many others.

Let's give them some credit...

My statements were aimed at exactly this direction. We shouldn't complain "that it took them two years to find the 'on' button of their coating machine", we should instead give them credit for the herculean task list the Ferrania folks went up against and are about to succeed with. I'm looking forward to their first production runs.

StoneNYC · Sep 7, 2014

Dr Croubie said:
I may even have that still somewhere on a non-floppy floppy disk (you know, the 3.5 inch 'hard' floppies).
I've got 3 VMs running under my Linux: Win7 I just installed, got my scanner with Silverfast, R3000 printer, and Canon DPP. Vista is the latest to support Mitsubishi GX developer (PLC programming), and Win2000 to use Mitsubishi GT works (PLC screen programming).

It sure beats my old setup, I had an old 386 to run 386 stuff off 3.5" and 5.25" floppies, a 5x86 running some sweet games, and my P2-350 accessing all my old scsi drives. Cabling and KVM switches were a nightmare. Plus an Atari ST to run Leisure Suit Larry off of 5 floppy disks. I must get that setup and play it again.

What's this got to do with Ferrania again? Their coating machines run on VirtualBox too?

I always found windows 2000 server to be the most stable windows OS so I stuck with that for a long time, even though my machine was not at all a server, it was like NT but even more stable and lots of stuff that shouldn't have been able to run on it seemed to work just fine so, consider that if you ever want a downgrade.

I've also got an IBM AT in the basement "just in case" running probably a 250k? hard drive. But I think we got an upgrade so it could be bigger. I wonder if it still boots?

Roger Cole · Sep 7, 2014

wblynch said:
I don't know what contrabanded chemicals are needed to make color film but seriously, governments should be more concerned with GMO's in food and global climate change than policing a minuscule little film industry.

I mean they aren't selling and processing a billion rolls a year anymore.

Oh good grief. I certainly am not a climate change denier but the GMO crap is much ado about nothing:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jonenti...-safe-to-eat-and-environmentally-sustainable/

Roger Cole · Sep 7, 2014

Ken Nadvornick said:
Couldn't agree more. One could do far worse than to aspire to become the Color Ilford. Modern marketing, which is what this is, will be hugely important to any chance of long-term success. Combine that with viable products produced in appropriate volumes for today's markets and they could be around for a good long while.

And make some good money. Not 80s money for sure. But 10s money not left on the table still spends the same.

Ken

New version of Ilfochrome to go with the new slide film(s)....

And then I woke up. Sigh.

StoneNYC · Sep 7, 2014

Roger Cole said:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jonenti...-safe-to-eat-and-environmentally-sustainable/

Thanks for the article, good read.

Now where is that guy who posts the picture of the derailed train over the bridge hanging down?

Photo Engineer · Sep 7, 2014

Regarding "outlawed" chemicals, lets consider Cadmium compounds. They were used rather abundantly in the manufacture of the old Medalist paper among other products. They were used at up to 15 grams / mole of Silver. (for the chemists here you can see how much that is especially in a product like Medalist! So, a search was started to find a chemical that was acceptable to the EPA and also "replicated" Medalist.

I know that many out there hated the "new" Medalist. Well, I agree. It was not the old Medalist. It took about 5 years to find the right chemical(s) that gave us Cadmium like results and that was only a near match. It worked much better in color paper than in B&W due to the image tone issues.

Oh, and Cd was used in several B&W papers so the use / sq ft of product was pretty high and the replacement chemical did not work the same in all products so we had to come up with a "package" for each product.

This is complex stuff guys..

PE

Xmas · Sep 7, 2014

Photo Engineer said:
Regarding "outlawed" chemicals, lets consider Cadmium compounds. They were used rather abundantly in the manufacture of the old Medalist paper among other products. They were used at up to 15 grams / mole of Silver. (for the chemists here you can see how much that is especially in a product like Medalist! So, a search was started to find a chemical that was acceptable to the EPA and also "replicated" Medalist.

I know that many out there hated the "new" Medalist. Well, I agree. It was not the old Medalist. It took about 5 years to find the right chemical(s) that gave us Cadmium like results and that was only a near match. It worked much better in color paper than in B&W due to the image tone issues.

Oh, and Cd was used in several B&W papers so the use / sq ft of product was pretty high and the replacement chemical did not work the same in all products so we had to come up with a "package" for each product.

This is complex stuff guys..

PE

Mercury in batteries - Birth defects etc., ...

Dr Croubie · Sep 7, 2014

Photo Engineer said:
I know that many out there hated the "new" Medalist. Well, I agree. It was not the old Medalist. It took about 5 years to find the right chemical(s) that gave us Cadmium like results and that was only a near match. It worked much better in color paper than in B&W due to the image tone issues.

I do wonder how much of this is just Baby Duck Syndrome.
Had Cadmium, Mercury, Lead, and all those other nasties been discovered harmful and banned 100 years ago instead of recently, we would never have had 'old' medalist and 'new' medalist. We would just have 'new' and noone would have been the wiser. Would it have been as loved? Would it have been good enough in an absolute sense, when there was no 'old' to compare it to in a relative sense?
Or Velvia 100F, would that have sold better if it weren't preceded by RVP? It was the love of RVP that killed 100F and brought in 100, and also brought back RVP50.
I've even heard car enthusiasts complaining that the 'lead replacement' stuff they have to put in their pre-1986 leaded petrol engines doesn't run as smoothly as good old leaded petrol. Of course they know that lead is bad so can't complain too loudly, but still "it doesn't run like it did in the old days".

Basically, if we'd rooted out the bad chems years ago, then we'd never have known the 'good old days', would we then be happier now with what we've got?

Xmas · Sep 7, 2014

Ken Nadvornick said:
Virtual machines (VMs) that simulate no longer supported software and hardware platforms are a mainstay of the industry. Working from home I have access via VPN to an entire range of VMs on which I can test software still under development for backward compatibility.

This very Windows 7 machine on which I am typing contains a virtual simulation of MS-DOS running on an ancient Intel 8088 segmented architecture CPU chipset, and it functions eerily correctly. On it I can still run an equally ancient native x86 assembly language graphics application* and it too works utterly perfectly.

Besides, how do you think all of those old discontinued film scanners keep working? The ones whose drivers were never updated beyond Windows XP? Well, they're running on WinXP VMs hosted on much later and more modern software and hardware architectures.

Or in the case of someone I know, a Nikon 5000 ED scanner is running on a Windows VM hosted on a Mac, with nary a problem.

Ken

* Does anyone remember the stunningly beautiful SkyGlobe planetarium program by Mark Haney of KlassM** Software? This would have been in the late 80s to early 90s, when men were men and software was pure opcodes and chip-level programming.

** You know, Class M, from the Vulcan Minshara***, denoting an oxygen/nitrogen/liquid water planet capable of supporting carbon-based life forms, including humans? If it ain't Class M, then you don't even want to think about beaming down...

*** One of a series of classifications from the Vulcan Planetary Classification System, the term roughly translates into English as mentally defective. It's use thus derived as a cleverly pejorative Vulcan description of Earth and its illogical native inhabitants.****

**** Which brings us back to APUG.*****

*****But I digress...

Hi Ken

You have missed the point about the chip in the smart phone.
A 4004 chip was also used in the HP35 calculator if it fails the calculator is in the trash can.
The chip read the button pushes, did the sums and displayed the results...
There is an embedded computer chip in the autos engine control unit (ECU) if it fails you need to go to auto scrap yard for donor vehicle for complete ECU.
If the embedded chip in the DSLR fails guess...
Embedded computers are completely different from computer peripherals.

Noel

Nzoomed · Sep 7, 2014

Photo Engineer said:
Regarding "outlawed" chemicals, lets consider Cadmium compounds. They were used rather abundantly in the manufacture of the old Medalist paper among other products. They were used at up to 15 grams / mole of Silver. (for the chemists here you can see how much that is especially in a product like Medalist! So, a search was started to find a chemical that was acceptable to the EPA and also "replicated" Medalist.

I know that many out there hated the "new" Medalist. Well, I agree. It was not the old Medalist. It took about 5 years to find the right chemical(s) that gave us Cadmium like results and that was only a near match. It worked much better in color paper than in B&W due to the image tone issues.

Oh, and Cd was used in several B&W papers so the use / sq ft of product was pretty high and the replacement chemical did not work the same in all products so we had to come up with a "package" for each product.

This is complex stuff guys..

PE

And not to mention that NiCad Batteries are still being produced, although their use has declined significantly, you can still purchase them.

Xmas · Sep 7, 2014

Dr Croubie said:
I do wonder how much of this is just Baby Duck Syndrome.
Had Cadmium, Mercury, Lead, and all those other nasties been discovered harmful and banned 100 years ago instead of recently,

discovered when? eg.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Eugene_Smith
can you look at his photos?

Did you do basic chemistry in school?
It is yes or no.

In the UK GM products are considered Frankenstein foods and are rejected there are court orders banning access to local crop fields.

We are happy to pay a premium for organic certificated products and ethically produced products.

Xmas · Sep 7, 2014

Nzoomed said:
And not to mention that NiCad Batteries are still being produced, although their use has declined significantly, you can still purchase them.

Don't forget about the nuclear weapons and reactors.

But if you have a NiCd battery don't discard it in land fill waste.

Also remember to book a ticket for transfer to planet B for offspring.

Ken Nadvornick · Sep 7, 2014

Xmas said:
Hi Ken

You have missed the point about the chip in the smart phone.
A 4004 chip was also used in the HP35 calculator if it fails the calculator is in the trash can.
The chip read the button pushes, did the sums and displayed the results...
There is an embedded computer chip in the autos engine control unit (ECU) if it fails you need to go to auto scrap yard for donor vehicle for complete ECU.
If the embedded chip in the DSLR fails guess...
Embedded computers are completely different from computer peripherals.

You are still sitting inside the box. Step out on the town. Why not just virtualize the entire HP35 calculator? Buttons and all?

I have a fully functional virtualized ancient Texas Instruments SR10 digital calculator. I did the virtualization myself. Using the simulated version is no different (at least functionally) than using the real one. It even looks and sounds identical. And I mean identical. Even all of the early flaws are faithfully preserved as well. It's pretty cool.

The biggest problem in solving big problems is fear and loathing while sitting frozen inside that box. If one always assumes problems are complex and insurmountable, they will be. If, however, one can let go and think big, anything becomes possible.

Go Ferrania...

Ken

Ken Nadvornick · Sep 7, 2014

Xmas said:
Don't forget about the nuclear weapons and reactors.

You are aware that nuclear weapons are also routinely virtualized these days, aren't you? Nobody actually blows them up to test them anymore. It's all done in software.

As is the global weather for forecasting purposes...

Ken

MattKing · Sep 7, 2014

Ken Nadvornick said:
You are still sitting inside the box. Step out on the town. Why not just virtualize the entire HP35 calculator? Buttons and all?

I have a fully functional virtualized ancient Texas Instruments SR10 digital calculator. I did the virtualization myself. Using the simulated version is no different (at least functionally) than using the real one. It even looks and sounds identical. And I mean identical. Even all of the early flaws are faithfully preserved as well. It's pretty cool.

The biggest problem in solving big problems is fear and loathing while sitting frozen inside that box. If one always assumes problems are complex and insurmountable, they will be. If, however, one can let go and think big, anything becomes possible.

Go Ferrania...

Ken

Ken:

Seems to me that your paragraph beginning with "The biggest problem ..." fits even better if you had ended your post with "Go Kodak Alaris".

Dr Croubie · Sep 7, 2014

Xmas said:
discovered when?

Strange, I was talking to my gf just yesterday about Minimata, couldn't remember the name of the town though.

I suppose I was using a looser definition of 'recently'. eg here in Aus we banned leaded petrol engines for new cars in 1986 (I know because that's when my parents bought our yellow XF Falcon). But up until even 10 years ago you could still buy leaded petrol at a servo, that's 20 years later.
Knowing something is harmful and governments having the cahones to do something about it are not correlated as much as they should be, and if they are then there's still a gap of a few decades of more sometimes.
Mercury we all know is bad, poisonous, whatever, and it's been taken out of tooth fillings and most batteries, but it's still available in thermometers.
Cadmium as PE said is no longer used to make some papers, but it's still in batteries.

Why NiCd batteries but not Hg? Maybe because mercury batteries are single-use and then thrown out, NiCd batteries are rechargeable so people will take them home and recharge them, when a NiCd dies it's easier to think to take it to a recycling depot? Or maybe it's just in a more inert form than Hg? (Which reminds me, I've got a whole bag of dead batteries to take to a shop one day).

Why Cd in batteries but not paper? Maybe because batteries are easier to think to recycle, if there's any Cd left in the paper it gets washed down the drain by most people, not everyone will think (or be able) to store bad water for safe disposal. Or if it's just used in the production, the sheer volumes of it might make in environmentally-unviable? (15g/mol sounds like a fair bit).

But anyway, if we knew how bad these chemicals were before we started using them, we'd never have used them to begin with. Unfortunately, we humans do treat our environment as a huge scientific experiment sometimes.
It's only after years or decades (or even centuries) that we realise something is bad and then have to undo all of the progress using that chemical in an effort to find something that works just as well without being deadly.
But then, there's really no other way to test long-term effects of anything without sending it into the wild and waiting to see what happens...

Xmas · Sep 7, 2014

Ken Nadvornick said:
You are still sitting inside the box. Step out on the town. Why not just virtualize the entire HP35 calculator? Buttons and all?

I have a fully functional virtualized ancient Texas Instruments SR10 digital calculator. I did the virtualization myself. Using the simulated version is no different (at least functionally) than using the real one. It even looks and sounds identical. And I mean identical. Even all of the early flaws are faithfully preserved as well. It's pretty cool.

The biggest problem in solving big problems is fear and loathing while sitting frozen inside that box. If one always assumes problems are complex and insurmountable, they will be. If, however, one can let go and think big, anything becomes possible.

Go Ferrania...

Ken

'Good' thinking but will you also virtulise

your mobile phone?
your DSLR?
your autos ECU?
Ferannis coater?

eg if you virtualize the calculator on the mobile phone (note my phone has one already) and the phone chip fails the phone is in the trash can with its virtual calculator.

Note when Ilfords 220 finisher failed they did not repair it...

Don't forget you also need a virtual elephant?

Xmas · Sep 7, 2014

Ken Nadvornick said:
You are aware that nuclear weapons are also routinely virtualized these days, aren't you? Nobody actually blows them up to test them anymore. It's all done in software.

As is the global weather for forecasting purposes...

Ken

Please can I inquire is 'nobod'y a new word for

India
Pakistan
N Korea and

Iran

they slipped up a bit on Greenland and Antartic glaciers in their models or is it the glaciers that are slip slip sliding away?

Their models are abstract at best...

ambaker · Sep 7, 2014

I suspect that Ilford did not repair their 220 coaster, or replace it, because there was a lack of 220 film demand. As opposed to inability.

Industrial equipment is vastly different from cell phones, and other integrated devices.

Our 15 year old reverse osmosis system finally ran out of spare pH probes. We had stockpiled, but they do have a shelf life. New probes would not talk to the old processor, old style has not been made for years.

Answer, new processor that can be made to talk to the rest of the equipment, and new probes that are currently in production.

In industrial equipment, there is room for equipment that can translate to older communication standards.

The big mechanical bits are more problematic. We ordered a pump shaft for a facility. It was dropped off the forklift, and damaged at arrival. The problem? Damage was not repairable, and lead time was one year. The facility closed for this and other reasons.

cmacd123 · Sep 7, 2014

Xmas said:
'Good' thinking but will you also virtulise

your mobile phone?

I remember selling the SR-10. It was very High tech in its day. I doubt a virtual version will slip in its virtual case and clip to your real belt and go to class with you.

Getting back to the subject of this thread, Ferrania will have to get their equipment working, and brought up to date. I am sure that there are many big boxes that can now be replaced with Arduino or Raspberry Pi computers, but the function of the software will have to be ported to the new hardware. The machine may have a lot of functions that were intended to be ridden by someone in a white lab coat that will have to be computerized to be practical. Having everything under computer control was the reason that Kodak Built Building 38 from scratch after all.

Now Ferrania has recently said { Dead Link Removed }that "In order to produce new products and reduce waste, Ferranias chefs needed a new kitchen. In 1966, the 3M Corporation gave them one - The L.R.F." ... "The doors were finally closed in 2006." Now the first Microcomputer was from the lat 1970 era, so whatever computerization was originally in that coater was based on older Minicomputers. Presumably their may be some 386 and 486 class machines in there now. so their will be a lot of work to get that system up to running with any sort of modern computer control.

The obsolete computer problem is also the major reason that Ilford decided that their 220 line was not economic to repair as I recall.

I am not wanting to sound down here, certainly a few well placed Raspberry Pi boards { http://www.raspberrypi.org/ } or Arduino { http://arduino.cc/ } can quickly provide control capabilities that were unheard of in 1966. But their will need to be a lot of engineering done.

Film from Italy -- Ferrania starting production 2014

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