Hello APUG from FILM Ferrania (PART 2)

[cmacd123]

Mitsubishi owned a large fraction of Konishiroku and coated some materials for them. Their founder, Konishiroku Emon, was a personal friend of George Eastman.
PE

that makes some sense, Mitsubishi did sell colour film, but I never saw any in the Market where I live. if they cooperated with Sakura/Konica they both may have had some input on the products. beside the "K, F" frame numbers, the Konica Private label stuff came in a film can similar but different to what EFKE used. and the later SR had blue streaks to code the type in the perforation area.

 

[cmacd123]

Polachrome (and Polapan), which I used to use in the early 90's was apparently made in the US. Polaroid also marketed "One Film" and a Business Use film. I have some rolls of the latter which don't really have the same signatures as Ferrania film in the rebate area and more closely resembles Agfa or Fuji with the "dot matrix" lettering.

The polachrome was a self developing film, one apparently loaded it in the processor, and it was mated with a chemical strip which acted as a monobath.. They also had a slide mounter.

The polaroid brand was also used to sell Plain colour negative film. some I got looked like it was Agfa (square black marks in between the perfs) while another batch resembled Fuji. probably the lowest bidder for each quarter of sales.

 

[alanrockwood]

IIRC Polaroid also made an "instant roll film". One would put it in some kind of box with some cartridge of chemicals, and one would end up with slide film that could be mounted and projected, in 135 format.
Did I dream about it?
Was it a Polaroid product?

Was that also made by Ferrania?

EDIT: I found it: Polachrome system, introduced in 1983. Is that the material which was made by Ferrania?

I have one of the plastic developing gizzmos for this process. I never used it, and I suppose it is useless now.

 

[Agulliver]

I lived stateside in the late 90s and used to buy some Polaroid branded colour negative film in Wal-Mart from time to time....I had the impression it was Ferrania material as it reacted very much like their films except one roll which I would swear is Agfa.

As stated above....probably the deal changed every year or so depending on the lowest bidder. The stuff was good value for everyday photos.

 

[blockend]

Polaroid also produced a colour movie film system, if memory serves it was in the early to mid 1980s. I doubt it attained much market share because Dixons (UK high street photo and electrical chain) were selling off the camera, projector kit with all the extras very cheaply.

No surprise to hear Orwo was old school Agfa. I was a fan of Agfa's stuff, and also got through a fair amount Orwo slide and B&W. The transparency material wasn't up to the market leaders, grainy for the speed and with a distinctly warm tone, but it had plenty of character and was ridiculously inexpensive with processing. Orwo black and white film was very nice, a classic emulsion. It was also cheap which people assumed meant poor quality. I thought it printed beautifully, as chance would have it found a few unexposed rolls from 1994 at the weekend.

 

[Agulliver]

Polavision was launched in the late 70s and dropped after about three years. The images it yielded were very muddy, poor quality compared to other super 8 movie films of the time (Kodachrome K40, anyone?). The Polaroid desktop viewer managed to mask the fact that in a regular super 8 projector the film looked terrible. I think it was a two colour additive process. And of course this would all have been around the time that video started to become popular.

Didn't Polaroid market a somewhat better "instant" 35mm slide film a few years later?

 

[cmacd123]

Polavision was launched in the late 70s and dropped after about three years. The images it yielded were very muddy, poor quality compared to other super 8 movie films of the time (Kodachrome K40, anyone?). The Polaroid desktop viewer managed to mask the fact that in a regular super 8 projector the film looked terrible.

I understood that Polavision was an updated Lenticular process. (think original Kodacolor Movie film) so the light transmission was quite a bit less than a "normal" film.

 

[Prof_Pixel]

Polavision had many problems: Image quality was poor. it wasn't 'instant' because you had to shoot the entire cartridge before processing it in a very large processor/viewer. But perhaps the biggest problem was it was being sold at the same time that home video movie cameras arrived on the market which offered true instant viewing and much higher image quality. It should never have reached to marketplace, but it was one of Ed Land's pet projects.

 

[1L6E6VHF]

Prof Pixel has this completely right.

Land had dreamed of Instant color movies as soon as he got the Model 95 on the shelves at Jordan Marsh. However, all efforts to get a working subtractive color transparency film failed. Land's determination and focus of attention that made him famous were his undoing when it came to Polavision.

Land didn't take the introduction of the first bulky, expensive portable color video systems as a warning to scrap the additive reseau color system, he took it as a reason to put the dull, unsharp, 15" picture on the market immediately. Truth be known, a Polavision kit was a lot less expensive than a 1978 home video system, and the Polavision camera far more portable than the video equipment, but the Polavision image was too compromised, and it was obvious that video would become cheaper and more portable quickly.

I even wonder if Polavision was Polaroid 's undoing. It was a colossal marketplace failure, and a very large investment had been made to bring it to market. After Polavision, their successful instant color print products were being priced at a dollar per shot. They probably did that to recoup some of the losses incurred in the Polavision debacle, but dollar-a-shot probably got people to go back to conventional still cameras, starving Polaroid of cash.

 

[Photo Engineer]

You have nailed Edwin Land rather accurately. He was a very unusual person, having met him in person and hearing him speak several times.

PE

 

[Prof_Pixel]

Kodak and Polaroid President Bill McCune had worked out a settlement to the Kodak/Polaroid patent litigation but Ed Land shot it down feeling 'disrespected' by Kodak. When I see Fuji's success with the Instax System, I always wonder 'what if' the settlement had been implemented.

 

[FILM Ferrania]

Didn't 3M make color film at one point?

3M bought Ferrania in 1964 - Dead Link Removed

 

[FILM Ferrania]

IIRC Polaroid also made an "instant roll film". One would put it in some kind of box with some cartridge of chemicals, and one would end up with slide film that could be mounted and projected, in 135 format.
Did I dream about it?
Was it a Polaroid product?

Was that also made by Ferrania?

EDIT: I found it: Polachrome system, introduced in 1983. Is that the material which was made by Ferrania?

Ferrania made Polaroid's non-instant 35mm films only.

 

[FILM Ferrania]

I lived stateside in the late 90s and used to buy some Polaroid branded colour negative film in Wal-Mart from time to time....I had the impression it was Ferrania material as it reacted very much like their films except one roll which I would swear is Agfa.

As stated above....probably the deal changed every year or so depending on the lowest bidder. The stuff was good value for everyday photos.

Yes, Polaroid switched up providers of their non-instant color negative 35mm films a couple of times. To the best of my knowledge, Ferrania was the last and longest provider, but not 100% consistently.

 

[FILM Ferrania]

I even wonder if Polavision was Polaroid 's undoing. It was a colossal marketplace failure, and a very large investment had been made to bring it to market. After Polavision, their successful instant color print products were being priced at a dollar per shot. They probably did that to recoup some of the losses incurred in the Polavision debacle, but dollar-a-shot probably got people to go back to conventional still cameras, starving Polaroid of cash.

Tom Petters ("The Madoff of Minnesota") was Polaroid's ultimate undoing - but Polavision was most certainly Edwin Land's undoing - he stepped down shortly after the product launched. And the money they spent on Polavision definitely compromised the stability of Polaroid going into the 80s. This was bad timing for sure because Polaroid had to face down the huge burst of one-hour photo labs literally everywhere (and with Double Prints!), plus the equally huge burst of cheap point-and-shoot 35mm cameras, PLUS the growing perception that making Polaroids was super expensive - a luxury kept for specific occasions only. These things only made Polaroid's problems worse in the 90s, and then came Petters...

 

[FILM Ferrania]

What about Lucky Color film from China? Whose film was that?

My partners say that Lucky was never entirely self-contained.

As I mentioned elsewhere, it used to be entirely normal NOT to do everything in-house. So normal that it's possible that the real answer is lost to history.

We could be wrong, of course. Anyone know for sure?

 

[FILM Ferrania]

Konica was founded in 1872, while Ferrania is a latecomer at 1883.

If you guys can help me establish that Konica was an entirely self-contained color and B&W film manufacturer, that would be amazing. Bonus - an approximate date when they released their first color film?

The Ferrania company was formed in 1917 when they decided to switch the S.I.P.E. factory (founded in 1882) from making nitrocellulose for bombs to making it for film.

 

[markjwyatt]

...
The Ferrania company was formed in 1917 when they decided to switch the S.I.P.E. factory (founded in 1882) from making nitrocellulose for bombs to making it for film.

Cool- drop the "nitro", keep the cellulose, slide coat some emulsion, an voilà, you have photographic film! I suspect there was a bit more involved than that...

 

[markjwyatt]

Speaking of 3M, it is not too surprising they got involved in making film; they are one of the world's experts in the area of precision coating (by precision I mean mainly die based, whether slot, slide, curtain, etc., but roll also). The University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, by no coincidence is one of the main academic centers for coating science. Prof. Skip Scriven sadly died several years back, and was key to that program. I imagine Rochester was the center of photographic sciences in the US.

 

[FILM Ferrania]

If you mean companies that created their own colour film from basic principles, then it's difficult to argue with this. But if you really mean, as you wrote, "manufacture from scratch", surely there were some more. Sakura (later Konica, later Konica-Minolta) made their own colour film in Japan independently of Fuji. The Hindustan Photo Films manufacturing company was set up to make film in India so it would not have to be imported. Orwo used Agfa film as a basis but manufactured film independently in East Germany after WWII. Gevaert made their own film before merging with Agfa. In the US, Ansco created and made their own films. Even Ilford made their own Ilfochrome film for a time. If you have the time, please do say if you know that some or all of these actually used someone else's materials or manufacturing plant.

OK, some more stuff to research!!

 

[flavio81]

You have nailed Edwin Land rather accurately. He was a very unusual person, having met him in person and hearing him speak several times.

PE

You are full of surprises, Ron. Would you please elaborate more about how was Edwin Land? I always wanted to research further on the man.

 

[Photo Engineer]

I found him detached, superior or maybe supercilious and rather distant. But then it was a brief encounter and so hard to describe beyond several encounters. His talk was "so here it is and I did it" or something like that. I have discovered something new. It was, in this case, 3D without glasses.

IDK, hard to answer Flavio.

PE

 

[flavio81]

I found him detached, superior or maybe supercilious and rather distant. But then it was a brief encounter and so hard to describe beyond several encounters. His talk was "so here it is and I did it" or something like that. I have discovered something new. It was, in this case, 3D without glasses.

IDK, hard to answer Flavio.

PE

Thank you for replying Ron! Perhaps even Edwin Land biographers would find it hard to answer too!

 

[blockend]

Didn't Polaroid market a somewhat better "instant" 35mm slide film a few years later?

I think Polaroid's instant slides were popular with the AV presentation market, which was still a serious business back then. Medical and academic institutions in particular welcomed the ability to project diagrams and graphs as teaching aids. I don't think it made any serious headway into the slide market, where you could still access 24 hour E6 for a slight premium.

Kodak and Polaroid President Bill McCune had worked out a settlement to the Kodak/Polaroid patent litigation but Ed Land shot it down feeling 'disrespected' by Kodak

My sister in law was given a new Polaroid camera and film after the shop had to recall her Kodak instant camera. Only Kodak were big enough to weather that kind of financial faux pas.

 

[Photo Engineer]

IDK if it was a faux pas. Sorry.

PE