Harman Photo cryptic announcement/teaser
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ilford.com is the other, Swiss-Japanese Ilford, isn't it? They're allowed to make colour film. HP5-Ilford is ilfordphoto.com
I might well buy a multi-segment umbrella from them.
I might well buy a multi-segment umbrella from them.
MattKing
Moderator
It was. Whether it is in any way still in existence is not clear.
And just to reiterate, there are no restrictions on making colour film. The only thing that Harman owns is the right to make and/or sell black and white film photography related products and put the "Ilford" brand on them.
Thanks clicking what you gave me works as it has always done when I click on to the above from the OP or Matt. However this time when I tried typing it in to the section for url addresses it worked
pentaxuser
That’s a different Ilford! Maybe this is why Harman are putting emphasis on the Harman brand. It can be very confusing as both Ilfords have very similar (the same!) branding.
Oooh I'm excited by this, the whole heavy metal thing is pretty cool. But I wish they'd hurry up and tell us!!
If it's an actual brand new colour emulsion my bank account will be crying
Assuming Harman retain the right to use the Ilford name on the B&W traditional photography products....and we have every reason to assume they do. It is beneficial to all parties...
Assuming that, the new Harman emphasis will be something they can't sell under the Ilford name and don't want to use the Kentmere name for. The obvious guess is some sort of colour film but that really is just a guess. And it's orders of magnitude more difficult to manufacture colour film than B&W. So while I absolutely hope it is colour film, I won't be disappointed if it's something else. But clearly they are going to use the Harman brand for something significant.
Anything branded Ilfocolor or Ilford and relating to digital/inkjet media or colour film has zero to do with Harman and is Ilford Imaging. Harman don't have the rights/license to use the Ilford name for those kinds of products. So it could merely be inkjet photo paper.
It's all got me curious.
Assuming that, the new Harman emphasis will be something they can't sell under the Ilford name and don't want to use the Kentmere name for. The obvious guess is some sort of colour film but that really is just a guess. And it's orders of magnitude more difficult to manufacture colour film than B&W. So while I absolutely hope it is colour film, I won't be disappointed if it's something else. But clearly they are going to use the Harman brand for something significant.
Anything branded Ilfocolor or Ilford and relating to digital/inkjet media or colour film has zero to do with Harman and is Ilford Imaging. Harman don't have the rights/license to use the Ilford name for those kinds of products. So it could merely be inkjet photo paper.
It's all got me curious.
The odds of Harman coating a color film emulsion seem rather slim to me from a technical viewpoint. Coating B&W and color are pretty different things. While it's theoretically possible they could figure out a workflow to do it, it would take multiple passes through the existing coating line, using up precious manufacturing capacity they likely need hard enough as it is to keep up with B&W film demand. Moreover, the R&D effort to build a color negative emulsion from scratch would be massive. Keep in mind Harman/Ilford has never made a color C41 film, so they would really start at square one. To those thinking that Ilfochrome would somehow be a jump-off point for a C41 effort: the knowledge and technology relating to their Ilfochrome materials is likely long and entirely lost to Harman, and the technological overlap between a dye destruction and a chromogenic material is rather limited.
A color chromogenic product is extremely unlikely to come from this angle. If one materializes, it likely won't be an actual Harman product, but something rebranded from Kodak. I doubt Harman has much interest in exploring that particular angle, though.
A color chromogenic product is extremely unlikely to come from this angle. If one materializes, it likely won't be an actual Harman product, but something rebranded from Kodak. I doubt Harman has much interest in exploring that particular angle, though.
it was on the @ilfordphoto account, on a story some days ago (account that is probably managed by harman, because it always has BW stuff).
All I was saying, though, is Harman markets more than film and silver-gelatin paper. They also sell inkjet paper, for example.
But selling colour film is a profitable bandwagon, at present, and is the most likely reason to create some kind of hype. There also has to be a reason why Harman would need to create an entirely new web presence (website and social media profiles) - and a colour film product is a likely reason.
First of all, the following is completely speculative, purely based on me connecting dots that are probably not even there, and I have no valid sources for anything that follows. But here it goes...
What if Harman would have purchased the old color negative machinery of eg. Fuji Tilburg in The Netherlands and set up their own color negative production line with it?
From a Fuji standpoint this could make sense, given the fact that they seem to have outsourced at least some of their C41 production to a company in the USA (presumably Kodak).
Harman are already producing B/W film for Fuji, so why not have them do color for Fuji as well?
And at the same time Harman could produce their own color film on the same production line too.
This would allow Fuji to stay in the analog film business without having the hassle of running their own factories for it.
Heck, we might even get PRO400H back!
Oh well, probably only wishful thinking...
Yes, I'd say so.
Firstly, a color film manufacturing system is a lot more than just a coater with some auxiliaries grouped around it. It's a highly integrated, highly complex manufacturing line. While coaters speak to the imagination, they're only a small (but critical) part of the overall system. We're not talking about a 'machine', we're talking about a 'plant', if you want to set up a color production site.
Due to the integrated nature of the manufacturing process, it's very hard or even impossible to have two coating operations sharing much of the other manufacturing infrastructure. Modifying a coating line to integrate a second coating operation into it would mean (1) a very lengthy hiatus in production, (2) a massive risk of technological problems bringing things back into operation, (3) a still rather massive investment and (4) systematic challenges with running two interdependent operations on shared infrastructure. For this reason, just getting a coater and adding it to an existing plant is really only a tiny bit of a much larger puzzle (not to mention a very unlikely scenario to begin with), and for a firm as Ilford/Harman it would take a rather massive leap of faith to basically build another plant in addition to existing film & paper lines.
Secondly, most of the assets for color film production at FUJIFILM in Tilburg were simply scrapped. They no longer exist. The coater(s) AFAIK may still exist and were most likely not sold off. They may still be in a shed somewhere on the FUJIFILM premises (or so I've been told; I've not actually seen them). It's extremely unlikely that FF would sell any of their giessers (which is how they call them, after the German 'gießen' - to pour) to a 3rd party.
Thirdly, even if Harman were to insurrect a color coating operation, they'd still have to develop the actual product. It's not like you build a coating plant, load a roll of PE film into it and pour silver nitrate solution in from the top and you get color film. C41 color film is a phenomenally complex product and it would take an operation like Harman several years to get even a mediocre product by today's standards.
It's easy to underestimate the complexity of photographic film (or paper).
They already have this position. Eastman Kodak coats their color negative film, Harman coats their B&W film and they coat their own color paper. Not to mention the whole Instax business which they (AFAIK) do entirely in-house. Not sure what they'd gain by trying to gear up another 3rd party for color film coating.
OP
OP
I haven't been able to find much info, but I did find this, see the following link:
"Harman Phoenix" trademark at the UK Intellectual Property office website.
This doesn't tell us too much, but with this registration we can see it's definitely called "Harman Phoenix", it's registered to Harman Technologies in the UK (Ilford Film producers), and it's a product in "Class 1", "Photographic film, paper and plates all being unexposed; unexposed sensitised photographic films; strips of sensitised photographic film [unexposed]; unexposed colour photographic films; unexposed cinematographic films; unexposed camera film; photographic developers; photographic sensitisers; photosensitive materials [films, unexposed]; chemical preparations and substances, all for use in processing photo-sensitive materials."
Interesting!
"Harman Phoenix" trademark at the UK Intellectual Property office website.
This doesn't tell us too much, but with this registration we can see it's definitely called "Harman Phoenix", it's registered to Harman Technologies in the UK (Ilford Film producers), and it's a product in "Class 1", "Photographic film, paper and plates all being unexposed; unexposed sensitised photographic films; strips of sensitised photographic film [unexposed]; unexposed colour photographic films; unexposed cinematographic films; unexposed camera film; photographic developers; photographic sensitisers; photosensitive materials [films, unexposed]; chemical preparations and substances, all for use in processing photo-sensitive materials."
Interesting!
As Ilford (Harman) is the B&W film lineup, reasonable to infer that it is not going to be something of the core film or B&W paper lineup.
A curiosity I discovered reading old literature was the Ilford Delta 200 existed; but I doubt that, or some hypothetical Delta 25 would be this hyped up
This form of marketing is a bit annoying, let's see if they reveal something soon.
Side topic: Just look at Inoviscoat. IIRC they gather a lot of the capital from Agfa, have been making Polaroid's "substrates" and their C41 film iterations we have seen in the form of Lomochrome and Orwo for the last 5 years. There are perfect examples of the above, and even PE commented on it (IIRC Metropolis exhibited characteristics of missing some components) Nowadays their last Agfacolor type 400 film is being rebranded as Ilfocolor, Orwo, possibly Lomo as well, etc.
Also about Ilford Color (Switzerland), does that entity exist anymore? Given that the assets were acquired by ADOX...
Just to throw another speculation, ADOX mentions for Color Mission that their former Color partner cooperation were awry, but have color capable facilities. From there, take it to whatever.
A curiosity I discovered reading old literature was the Ilford Delta 200 existed; but I doubt that, or some hypothetical Delta 25 would be this hyped up
This form of marketing is a bit annoying, let's see if they reveal something soon.Side topic: Just look at Inoviscoat. IIRC they gather a lot of the capital from Agfa, have been making Polaroid's "substrates" and their C41 film iterations we have seen in the form of Lomochrome and Orwo for the last 5 years. There are perfect examples of the above, and even PE commented on it (IIRC Metropolis exhibited characteristics of missing some components) Nowadays their last Agfacolor type 400 film is being rebranded as Ilfocolor, Orwo, possibly Lomo as well, etc.
Also about Ilford Color (Switzerland), does that entity exist anymore? Given that the assets were acquired by ADOX...
Just to throw another speculation, ADOX mentions for Color Mission that their former Color partner cooperation were awry, but have color capable facilities. From there, take it to whatever.
Indeed, which illustrates how long the road to a halfway decent C41 film is. It's really a massive challenge. Of course, Inoviscoat has had to do all this on a shoestring budget, very limited manpower and massive uncertainty, but even for a player like Harman it's not all that easy to dedicate a significant team to an effort like this for an extended period of time. Imagine you're putting 6 people on the project for 5 years; you're looking at a 2.5M$ investment in labor costs only, easily, and that's not even counting spending on suppliers/external parties, materials, capital investments in equipment etc. You have to sell a lot of film even at today's prices to just be able to afford those people, keeping in mind they only cost the company money in the R&D phase when the cash flow of the project is entirely negative.
in a recent interview with Nico's photography show on youtube an Harman/ilford guy said they had some more than decent years and were developing new products. (ofc color film needs more than a decent budget, but it's a good thing they have the budget to develop something instead of just mantaining the line)
Well, it's not a color negative film. It's B&W, as you also point out. And making an actual color film is a different cup of tea.
Andrew O'Neill
Moderator
The pheonix is there for a reason. Resurrecting a colour film? Since I've only ever used their B/W films since I got into photography around '91, the only B/W that went away that I recall was Delta 400 in sheets. That would be swell to get it back! But... I have a feeling it's colour. Makes sense...
Could it be Cibachrome?
Theoretically. But given the fact that the former Geigi facilities were sold off long ago (partly used by Adox, currently) and in all likelihood the technological knowledge has long ago left the company, I'd be very surprised.
Another reason is that the market for a resurrected dye destruction/color positive print material would be really, really tiny. You'd be very hard pressed to even make a decent business case for analog-only RA4 paper, let alone something that'll print E6 in a darkroom. The number of E6 shooters is quite limited and the subset who prints their slides is smaller, and out of those, a good many are perfectly happy enough scanning their slides and outputting in whatever digital means is available to them.
The niche you'd end up targeting Cibachrome to would not justify resurrection of the infrastructure, which would include also the processing chemistry and distribution thereof. Also, part of this chemistry had a notoriously limited shelf life, as did the 'paper' itself, so logistics in a low volume market would be an utter nightmare.
Color negative would be more likely than Cibachrome, and even that takes a ton of (IMO baseless) optimism to believe in.
Yeah, it’s probably just a disposable HP5 camera with a different design printed on it.
The phoenix is in grey on black. It's a poor hint for a colour film.
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