I see its mentioned that the formulas were designed for acetate base, but something that may not have been pointed out, is actually (to my surprise) that most modern films still made today by kodak and fuji are using acetate base.
You are correct! And most of the base material used by the industry (triacetate or polyester) is produced by just one company in Germany called IPI. It's my understanding that Kodak is now their biggest customer since they shut down their own base production last year (or maybe the year before?)
Depending on the quality of our in-house stockpile of base (all of which must be hand-checked inch by inch), we may need to purchase from IPI for the short term as well. But eventually, we will put "Trixie" online and make our own.
The only real exception is motion picture films, but also some other stocks like rollei digibase made by agfa that is extremely prone to light piping due to the highly transparent nature of the polyester base.
I know there is some concern from the factory team that our existing base material may not be appropriate for cine films, but they will be testing this extensively once we our first coated miniJumbo in-hand.
I guess what im trying to say is when reading the article, it sounds like its an outdated formula from the scotchchrome days, when really its not that outdated at all and acetate film base is on the majority of films made today.
"Outdated" is sort of the wrong word regarding our use of the original Ferrania recipes. Is grandma's recipe for chocolate cake outdated? Probably not - but maybe she used lard where we would now use a less artery-clogging substitute. More accurately, grandma's CAKE, not the recipe, may be dependent on the type of oven and bakeware she used. But grandma can only make one cake at a time in her own kitchen. The "same" cake would obviously be different if she were baking 10,000 of them in an industrial kitchen.
Using this analogy, the old Ferrania only produced the 10,000 cakes, but we're using grandma's recipe (with no lard) and grandma's kitchen!
Other thing regarding logo, perhaps we should take a vote?
Sorry to say that as much as we want community feedback on our products - it's an incredibly slippery slope to open our branding to the general public. Suffice to say that we adore most of Ferrania's old branding and we will keep it where we can and refresh it where we must. But it's of course complicated by the fact that there is still a Ferrania company who may retain ownership of some logos... We're still figuring some of these things out as we move forward.
Also interesting to note is it appears that along the sprocket edge of the last solaris films, was infact the original ferrania logo still imprinted along the frame numbers!
Would be cool to keep these features retained if possible
At this point, I'm not sure what our precision coater can imprint on the film. I suspect it's not as sophisticated as the big coater - but you raise a good point and I'm going to ask the factory team about it!
