First roll of Harman Phoenix photos up!

Film-Niko said:

One stopped buying Color Mission, and another one reduced his usage of Color Mission.

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Not particularly smart, are they? And I'm glad for that. More CM for the rest of us, because it's great! You photographer friends can spend their money on... Instax!

Lachlan Young said:

The 1990s market was so big it easily supported all sorts of minority market things....

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O.k., now you are contradicting your former comment. No problem, as you are now confirming my assessment .

Lachlan Young said:

Kodak did several chromogenic B&W's (T400 and Portra) as they fitted into certain professional market workflows (e.g. wedding/ commercial portrait) where everything was going through minilabs on to RA4. They weren't really meant for the hobby market, and indeed had masks that made them far more useful on to RA4.

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That is not correct. Kodak's chromogenic films have not been mainly addressed to the professional market. They were mainly made for the consumer market. To make use of BW easier in the mass market, as the films could be developed in every minilab at the corner of the street and by drug store chains. I very well remember the Kodak marketing at that time, which was clearly targeting the consumer market. I have used XP2 all the years, and when Kodak introduced its first chromogenic BW film (T400 CN), I had immediately a close look to it, and tested it right after its introduction (it was one of Kodak best BW films ever, and surpassing XP2 in fine grain and resolution).

Lachlan Young said:

But when Fuji wanted to get a share of that market, who did they turn to? Ilford.

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Yes, because they were very late to the party. Fuji's market research showed at the mid 90ies that digital will change the photo market fundamentally.
And BW film has always been a very small niche for them in relation to their color film business. Therefore the decision not to start own R&D. Kodak and Agfa had a much bigger BW business than Fuji.

Lachlan Young said:

You're very desperate to try and attack innovative approaches ..........

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???????
I have not attacked anything, and definitely not innovative approaches.
Ilford's Delta technology is nothing new, it has been established since decades. Their first film with it was Delta 400 in 1990. As soon as it was introduced, I tested it and found it much better than HP5+. A great step forward.
The Delta technology is excellent. But for a precise and correct assessment you also have to compare it to Kodak's T-grain technology.
And from proper done tests side-by-side T-grain in comparison delivers finer grain, higher resolution, in the cases of TMY-2 and TMZ also better sharpness.

So even when Harman in the future will have implemented Delta into a color film, it will not put it on the same level in that regard as Kodak. Or even Fuji with their latest Superia films, which have been finer grained than Kodak's consumer CN films like Gold and Ultramax.

Agfa, Konica and Ferrania have not achieved the same level concerning detail rendition of Fuji and Kodak.
And that despite being huge producers producing hundreds of million film p.a., with thousands of workers and very big R&D departments.
Decades of R&D work. But none of them could close the technology gap to Kodak and Fuji.

And you are now claiming that Harman with its much much smaller R&D team and much much smaller funding will get to the Kodak level in only five years.
Sorry, but I think that is unrealistic.

pentaxuser said:

I felt that Harman's publicity dept gave the impression at its video launch that 2 newly qualified young chemists had been instrumental in the development of Phoenix

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You have misunderstood that. The two emulsionists that were also interviewed in the long video are working for 7, the other one for 8 years for Harman. That are their current main emulsionists, the leading staff.
They replaced the older emulsionists which have retired some years ago. They also said in the interview that the older, retired emulsionists have helped them in certain aspects.

Film-Niko said:

You have misunderstood that. The two emulsionists that were also interviewed in the long video are working for 7, the other one for 8 years for Harman. That are their current main emulsionists, the leading staff.
They replaced the older emulsionists which have retired some years ago. They also said in the interview that the older, retired emulsionists have helped them in certain aspects.

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Thanks, ít must be my age. They looked incredibly young to me but OK. I presume however that despite their 7 and 8 years of working for Harman their knowledge and experience in C41 colour films was much more recent . In fact in the video they said that they were given the task of " seeing what they could do" as if it was an exciting experiment for two relatively young but keen R&D men. So the impression given to me was that this was just an experiment by Harman on a nothing ventured nothing gained basis Others of course may see it differently

They had studied chemistry at school and both had "passed" but the interviewer did not ask at what level they had passed I presume it was not at university degree level on the basis of them not correcting the use of the word school by the interviewer and had it been a "pass" at that level achieved when 21 or 22 years of age this would have made them at least 29 or30 years of age with 7 and 8 years of Harman experience. If they were those ages then as I said they looked younger.

Anyway the video seems to reinforce what you are contending and I agree with your contention, namely this was something that had small beginnings and was not ,initially at least , something on which Harman had "bet their savings " in terms of R&D manpower so that achieving the Kodak level in the next 12-18 months may not be realistic

If anyone wants to see the video either for the first or second time you can go back to page 2 of this thread and #49 The interview part begins at 6 mins 25 secs

The presenter of the overly long and at times irrelevant video apparently chose to fly ( at his own expense?) from the West Coast of the U.S all the way to Mobberley to find out for the viewers of the video why Harman chose to make a colour film and yet judging by the interviewer's accent it was not he, the presenter, who conducted the inteviews with the R&D staff or the Sales and Marketing manager - very strange

Anyway I digress

pentaxuser

BrianShaw said:

just the paucity of authoritative inside information in general

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Which is pretty standard. It just would help if more people weren't fixated on the idea that Harman's scientists are total neophytes and idiots (and who must bow down to the supreme knowledge being handed down from photo hobbyists riding their hobbyhorses on the internet). By way of an analogy, there are ways to go to space in 2024 that don't involve a Saturn V, some of those are better than others and not all of the ones that work reasonably well are from those with a direct aerospace hinterland.

JParker said:

After 2003 no further developed consumer film products have hit the market.

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There were several quiet revisions even in consumer film for 'manufacturability' - which can mean total reformulation. From what I understand, the cinema emulsion team and the still emulsions teams were separate and while they may have been drawing from a common technological data pool, they were not sharing staff - and those that weren't needed were being shed by the business. If you look at the revisions/ new introductions after the move to B38 was completed (which required re-formulations) there are essentially products that in order for them to have been launched when they were, would have easily filled the time 2003-11 - the 2006 revision of NC/ VC, 2007, TMY-II, Portra 800-3, Ektar, Portra 400, Portra 160, add in the manufacturing revisions of Gold 200, the Ultramaxes etc - take their launch times and count back 18-24 months, plot them on a calendar and you'll see that 1, maybe 2 teams would have been going project-to-project. A lot of the 'new' technology was the application of extant knowledge from 5-20 years earlier (if you want to waste hours in the patent record and academic texts).

Harman have plenty of work ahead of them, but some on this thread want to pretend it's so impossibly and implausibly difficult that they must not be able to succeed, when the reality is they have the map, know what they need to do and are steadily working on solutions (depending on budget being available). The fact is that Phoenix has sold better than projected, and at the end of the day, that's all Harman's R&D budget cares about - it's made them money (and delivered a very public statement of intent) on something that would otherwise have been scrapped at a loss after it had served its purpose as a research stepping stone.

Film-Niko said:

Kodak's chromogenic films have not been mainly addressed to the professional market.

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Maybe in Germany where there seems to have been a bigger advanced amateur market.

Elsewhere, T400CN was sold under the Kodak Professional brand, as was Portra BW400CN.

Film-Niko said:

And from proper done tests side-by-side T-grain in comparison delivers finer grain, higher resolution, in the cases of TMY-2 and TMZ also better sharpness.

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Perhaps. Some of the problems I've seen in those tests involve insufficient normalisation of real relative speeds. And a lack of curiosity about how 'latitude' has impact on aspects of sharpness and granularity. The end products are all designed to somewhat different ends to begin with, often as a reaction to how the market understood/ perceived a competitor's earlier product. Very few are/ were designed on a complete tabula rasa basis.

Kodak also has epitaxial technology (Maskasky et al), but it only ever seems to have got as far as enacting it in X-ray materials. With the 'normal' photographic materials, they clearly chose to refine the technology they know (and add layer dye/ 2 electron sensitisation which essentially bought them 2 stops of speed/ grain improvement) rather than digging deeper into basic emulsion work. Which isn't to say that the use of high aspect ratio crystals in one layer and 3D structures in another is effectively an analogue of epitaxy by another means, with some of the potentially expensive and time-consuming research problems avoided. Epitaxy potentially seems to allow for a much thinner emulsion layer that behaves like multiple emulsions - but with a narrower qualitative exposure window (e.g. granularity becomes sharper and more obvious when overexposed).

There are (I think) open questions over aspects of technology sharing over the years between Ilford and Agfa and Ilford and Fuji which we'll likely never hear any real details of. But there are some interesting correlations and SEM images that raise more questions than have been adequately answered.

Film-Niko said:

That are their current main emulsionists, the leading staff.

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They happen to be two researchers working on Phoenix, the more senior of whom seems to be leading that project, but there's a fair few relatively new intakes of various levels of experience - Ilford have even interviewed some of them on their website. The really important people for a project like this will be the organic chemists in the kilo lab.

Lachlan Young said:

They happen to be two researchers working on Phoenix, the more senior of whom seems to be leading that project, but there's a fair few relatively new intakes of various levels of experience - Ilford have even interviewed some of them on their website. The really important people for a project like this will be the organic chemists in the kilo lab.

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You may be right but when you look at the video to which I referred it certainly looks and sounds as if 2 neophytes were given the go ahead to see what they could do

Of course this was not as far as I know a video commissioned and made by Harman but someone with Harman's permission was allowed to come in and interview these two young men and they gave answers that indicated to me it was a " have a go and see what you can do" remit they were given

If the entry to C41 díd not amount to such an inauspicious start that resulted in great success 12 months as was indicated by these two then you'd have thought Harman might have wanted to add some more info at least

You may know a lot more about who is in fact " the main project planner" and what other resources have now been added to the plan If that is the case then please tell us but if what you have said is an informed guess based on your knowledge of such matters then that's fine also

Thanks

pentaxuser

Andrew O'Neill said:

I'd like to see it in sheet film sizes... at least 4x5.

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Yeah, that would be great. And not outside the realm of possibility, I think, Ilford has been pretty good to the LF crowd.

Lachlan Young said:

There were several quiet revisions even in consumer film for 'manufacturability' - which can mean total reformulation.

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All the film production of Kodak has been consolidated at B38 in 2000-2002. Tri-X got therefore a significant, visible update, being a bit finer grained. But I have used the consumer films at that time, and there have not been any changes. If a change based on relevant R&D progress and product performance improvement would have happened, I would have seen that.

Lachlan Young said:

From what I understand, the cinema emulsion team and the still emulsions teams were separate and while they may have been drawing from a common technological data pool, they were not sharing staff -

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What I have read in interviews with Kodak staff over the years, the R&D in that time span was not strongly separated. It was the time when film sales declined by 30-40% per year, Kodak closed all overseas factories, consolidation and massive cost-cutting was inevitable for survive. And it does not make sense in a such a situation to keep unnecessary, expensive parallel structures from the film boom times. Especially in R&D, where the results are needed and usable across the product line. The improvements in grain for the cine films and Portra are an example for that, the same new technology was implemented.

Lachlan Young said:

Harman have plenty of work ahead of them, but some on this thread want to pretend it's so impossibly and implausibly difficult that they must not be able to succeed,

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I have not seen such comments here. Maybe I have overlooked them. Can you please give evidence and a link to it? Thanks.

Andrew O'Neill said:

I'd like to see it in sheet film sizes... at least 4x5.

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You can tell them directly: Via their homepage, via facebook, via instagram, via youtube.

Lachlan Young said:

Which is pretty standard. It just would help if more people weren't fixated on the idea that Harman's scientists are total neophytes and idiots (and who must bow down to the supreme knowledge being handed down from photo hobbyists riding their hobbyhorses on the internet).

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With all respect, but such completely wrong accusations are very very bad for the discussion culture here.
Absolutely no one has said Harman's scientists are total neophytes and idiots. Just the opposite, all have expressed their respect and appreciation for them. And many are buying Phoenix to support their efforts. So they put their money were their mouth is, me included.

Lachlan Young said:

Harman have plenty of work ahead of them, but some on this thread want to pretend it's so impossibly and implausibly difficult that they must not be able to succeed,

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That is also not correct at all. You have made the very bold claim that Harman in only five years can get to the Kodak quality standard.
So something what even huge global players with very big R&D budgets like Agfa, Konica and Ferrania could not achieve in several decades of hard work.
Therefore some members here simply look at the facts and are more realistic. That's all.
No one is saying that Harman must not be able to succeed. It is just that progress will take time, and cannot be achieved over night.

Lachlan Young said:

Maybe in Germany where there seems to have been a bigger advanced amateur market.

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Germany? I have not talked about Germany. I have talked about the global marketing for that film. And the labs: All labs I have talked to told me that 90-95% of the incoming Kodak monochrome film is from amateurs.

Lachlan Young said:

Perhaps. Some of the problems I've seen in those tests involve insufficient normalisation of real relative speeds. And a lack of curiosity about how 'latitude' has impact on aspects of sharpness and granularity.

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When I do my tests (based mainly on the methodolgy by Image Engineering) all BW films are developed to the same contrast for comparison. And all other well reputed film testers I know are doing the same.

Gentlemen, the discussion is starting to get a little too edgy. Kindly remain respectful and constructive. The topic is too interesting for us moderators to have to intervene in a restrictive manner. Please try to help and prevent this. Thank you.

Just FYI:
More tests of the new 120 version are coming in. Including improving knowledge about scanning techniques. Here a direct comparison of 135 format Phoenix to 120 format Phoenix by Kyle McDougall:


Best regards,
Henning

Henning Serger said:

Just FYI:
More tests of the new 120 version are coming in. Including improving knowledge about scanning techniques. Here a direct comparison of 135 format Phoenix to 120 format Phoenix by Kyle McDougall:


Best regards,
Henning

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It’s not at all clear from Kyle’s review that there is any difference between the 120 and 35mm film stock itself. Obviously, as well known to medium format folks, a bigger negative brings many benefits. Everything still points to Harman using the same master rolls for both 120 and 35mm, and until someone can do the sensitometry and densitometry, we’re all guessing.

ChrisGalway said:

It’s not at all clear from Kyle’s review that there is any difference between the 120 and 35mm film stock itself. Obviously, as well known to medium format folks, a bigger negative brings many benefits. Everything still points to Harman using the same master rolls for both 120 and 35mm, and until someone can do the sensitometry and densitometry, we’re all guessing.

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Are the two on the same film base (thickness)?

ChrisGalway said:

It’s not at all clear from Kyle’s review that there is any difference between the 120 and 35mm film stock itself.

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Chris, for me it looks like the emulsion is the same. I think that is important to know.

ChrisGalway said:

Obviously, as well known to medium format folks, a bigger negative brings many benefits.

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Of course. The very coarse grain and low resolution of Phoenix does not show so much in medium format, as the enlargement factor is lower compared to 35mm.

ChrisGalway said:

Everything still points to Harman using the same master rolls for both 120 and 35mm, and until someone can do the sensitometry and densitometry, we’re all guessing.

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Most probably not the same parent rolls (as Harman calls their masterrolls), because 35mm and 120 are normally coated on a base with different thickness at Harman.
But I think the explanation how the Harman lab has done the scanning and invertion, is quite interesting. We see now better colour rendition compared to the market introduction because the knowledge in post processing for this film is increasing.

Best regards,
Henning

Over the weekend I developed a roll of Phoenix 200 in 120, and it seems to be the same emulsion as the 135 version.

Old pine tree - Rolleiflex35F_Phoenix200_010 by Zheng, on Flickr

Autumn color at Fallen Leaf Lake - Rolleiflex35F_Phoenix200_008 by Zheng, on Flickr

Another roll of Harman Phoenix in medium format, with a Minolta Autocord TLR. This time I think I got the cleanest, most detailed, least grain, and most color accurate images I got out of the Harman Phoenix film. I changed my scanning workflow:

• I scanned on Epson V700 flatbed scanner, as slides/positives instead of negatives.
• I used Negative Labs Pro (default NLP Neutral settings) in Lightroom to invert the images.

Here are a few examples:

Colorful bee hives - AutocordMX_Phoenix200_003 by Zheng, on Flickr

Not so scary - AutocordMX_Phoenix200_009 by Zheng, on Flickr

Autumn leaves - AutocordMX_Phoenix200_010 by Zheng, on Flickr

Caterpillar - AutocordMX_Phoenix200_012 by Zheng, on Flickr

Indian corn - AutocordMX_Phoenix200_007 by Zheng, on Flickr

I like its punchiness...

Nice images, I would expect a film like Phoenix to look a little better on low-contrast, uncoated lenses that could open up the shadows a little more.

Nice images. I might just get some 120 Phoenix for use in older cameras. I am wondering what 1930s lenses could do with Phoenix.

Sometimes I wonder, while looking at Phoenix 200 negatives on a light table, why don't Harman just make a slide film out of it? It is punchy and contrasty, with clear base. Since I'm not a chemical engineer, maybe it is super hard to do a slide film where the dye will be totally different from C41 film. @Henning Serger ?

blee1996 said:

why don't Harman just make a slide film out of it? It is punchy and contrasty, with clear base.

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Well, the base isn't quite as clear as a proper slide film. And the dmax of Phoenix is high, but again not quite as a high as a proper slide film. I also have some doubts about its color reproduction, especially w.r.t. crossover behavior in shadows and highlights. All taken together, it would take a good bit of further R&D to get a presentable slide film.

Then again, something along those lines was also my argument when it came to a color negative film in the first place. Turns out Harman was OK with introducing something most of us don't consider a 'proper' color film, and instead is more like an early stop on the longer journey towards a final product. For a slide film product they might indeed have done the same and market something 'creative'.

Mind you, reversal processing Phoenix is something I still have on my to-do list - although admittedly it's pretty far down that list.

The market for C41 consumer colour film is by far the biggest slice of the still film market. Possibly 90% of the market. Making a slide film would certainly be interesting in a good way, but it's not going to sell in sufficient quantities to recoup the R&D costs.

blee1996 said:

Sometimes I wonder, while looking at Phoenix 200 negatives on a light table, why don't Harman just make a slide film out of it? It is punchy and contrasty, with clear base. Since I'm not a chemical engineer, maybe it is super hard to do a slide film where the dye will be totally different from C41 film. @Henning Serger ?

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To answer your questions:
1. With their XP2 Super - which is technologically a colour-negative film - they had / have a very good basis for the CN film project and Harman Phoenix. By that they could build on established, very well working existing technology. No need to start from scratch.

2. The colour negative film market is by far the biggest market for standard (non-instant) film. So for market-strategic and economical reasons that is the most important market, and the one that has to be served first, if you want to establish yourself as a new colour film manufacturer.

3. In the colour negative film market there is also a small, but nonetheless relevant customer group which generally likes "experimental", non-conventional colour films.
So we have currently the customers who appreciate Harman's general effort to start colour film production, and buying Harman Phoenix to support R&D and are hoping for significantly better films in the future.
And we have the customers who just buy Phoenix for what it is, a very different film on a lower quality level compared to established Kodak and Fujifilm standards.
And of course there are also customers who belong to both groups.

4. Colour reversal film / positive film is more challenging to produce. Higher investments in R&D are needed.

Best regards,
Henning

Thank you for the clear explanation. Let's hope Harman can further improve their Phoenix C41 emulsion, to be a worthy alternative to Kodak products.