Cibachrome P-30 chemistry was highly corrosive. My understanding is that the bleach-fix was the issue. It needed to be neutralized before disposal.
I have a small scanning business where we market to seniors and their children to 'digitize' their heirloom transparencies. Scanning 40 year old Kodachrome slides is a joy. They look like they were made last week. The colour, the quality is fantastic. Especially when compared to 40 year old E6 type slides which are faded and thin.
Not pretending we'll see the return of Kodachrome. But the nuances of manufacture can't be impossibly arcane or impossibly difficult when Kodachrome and Agfacolor were being manufactured successfully in the 1930's (eighty years ago), in the days of airships, Neville Chamberlain, Adolf Hitler and Frankin Roosevelt, and before anyone now working at Kodak was born ! In the 1980's we had Kodachrome being made in matching quality in the US, UK and France, processed consistently in many countries, and with various quite presentable "copy-cat" products made in the UK (Ilford) and Japan and possibly USSR.
I have just finished a job for an elderly friend of mine, scanning approximately 220 Kodachome slides all taken between 1967-1975. To be honest they were dreadful! Apart from the possibility that the person who took them was not very photographically saavy, so ignoring those with camera shake, or those that were over exposed or, under exposed, the number that were good enough to save on a memory stick without having to do a great deal of work on them was probably less than 50. There were a lot that had faded so badly over the years and blue had become the prominent colour cast, then there were a few that had distorted reds, so that peoples faces looked badly sunburned.
How long ago these were last looked at I have no idea, but they were all stored in the original yellow boxes which were then in the thin card outer box used when they were posted back. I have no reason to believe that they were stored anyway else differently.
Towards the end of Kodachrome around 2003 or so, I used 2-3 cassettes of Kodachrome 200 ISO film on a trip over to Europe. They had to be sent to the normal Kodak address in England and from there they were all sent over to Switzerland for processing. I think it was close on 3 weeks before they came back. The quality was appalling! All had a very prominent pink colour cast. On one cassette in particular there were no true blacks but no real clear areas either, so they were not over exposed. In all they were rubbish! If I had been asked my opinion, I would have said they had been exposed to a heat source prior to processing. I know the film was 200 ISO but the grain when the slides projected was almost akin to that of the long gone Kodak Infra red.
If it ever came back, I for one will never again use Kodachome.
Cibachrome P-30 chemistry was highly corrosive. My understanding is that the bleach-fix was the issue. It needed to be neutralized before disposal.
At the Canadian Kodak lab where he worked, the norm was "processing included" but they certainly did see a fair amount of US film.
Yes, but it was also designed that if you mixed the 3 spent chemicals together ( dev, fix and bleach) they neutralized each other.
No, they had a separate neutralizer chemical that you had to use! Mine came in tablet form.
The Canadian mailing envelopes were just convenience envelopes. If you put a non-process paid roll in them, you were supposed to get a bill for the processing. And if you sent a process paid Canadian roll to a Canadian lab in your own packaging, you were supposed to get your film back processed without charge.When I was a kid, my dad was "forced" to buy some 126 Kodachrome on a trip to Canada. (The place we were at didn't have any Ektachrome in stock.) Now, he didn't like Kodachrome because he had to wait longer for it. When we got home, he took about 40 126 cartridges into the camera shop he used to have all this Ektachrome and 1 cartridge of Kodachrome processed. The man in the store told him he had already paid for processing since it was Canadian Kodachrome and he should send it away in the mailer. No way dad was waiting for that so he had the shop send it to Fair Lawn, NJ. The man in the store gave me a new 126 cartridge of Kodachrome and told me to have fun with it, put it in the Canadian mailer and send it in. I got my slides back in about 10 days, so I guess they were perfectly happy with a US film in a Canadian mailer.
Jason
Was that P30 or P3 chemistry? I still have some P30 kits and just looked at them. No seperate neutralizer. The P30/Cibachrome manual says that all 3 spent solutions when mixed together are nearly neutral and can be poured down the drain with no further treatment.
Perhaps Kodak could also be in charge of a presidential ballot re-count too.
Or maybe bring the Olympics to Chicago.
APUG'rs, stop all this nonsense, this kooky-talk, Kodachrome ain't cummin back !!!
You are probably going to be proved right......but.....had someone told me just a month ago that Ektachrome would be coming back I would have called it crazy talk....and yet we will have it by the end of the year.
The Canadian mailing envelopes were just convenience envelopes. If you put a non-process paid roll in them, you were supposed to get a bill for the processing. And if you sent a process paid Canadian roll to a Canadian lab in your own packaging, you were supposed to get your film back processed without charge.
I don't know what US Kodak labs were supposed to do with Canadian process paid film.
You are probably going to be proved right......but.....had someone told me just a month ago that Ektachrome would be coming back I would have called it crazy talk....and yet we will have it by the end of the year.
My strong gut feeling is that we will have Ektachrome rather than Kodachrome, and not both....and the only thing any of us can do if we want Kodachrome to come back, is to buy the Ektachrome when it's released. Show Big K that there's still a market for colour reversal film. Let them know we're delighted with Ektachrome and would be ecstatic if Kodachrome came back too....while not getting hopes up too high.
I dont think I will be buying any other than a roll or two for testing until i can empty my pile of e100g in my freezer!This exactly. I really like slide film so I will be sure to buy Ektachrome when it arrives. It sends a signal.
But Kodachrome is a less complex film to make than Ektachrome, only problem is that a processing lab is needed.The difference is that the return of Ektachrome was unlikely, but not that unfeasable to do. The return of Kodachrome, as we have seen time and time again, is quite unfeasable.
A good question and if reading APUG is part of it and they believe we are not unrepresentative of the film market then I could hazard a guess. It would not be anywhere this side of optimistic unless Kodachrome can be re-started easily and cheaply and be closed equally easily and cheaplyI wonder how their investigation is going...
But Kodachrome is a less complex film to make than Ektachrome, only problem is that a processing lab is needed.
Was that P30 or P3 chemistry? I still have some P30 kits and just looked at them. No seperate neutralizer. The P30/Cibachrome manual says that all 3 spent solutions when mixed together are nearly neutral and can be poured down the drain with no further treatment.
But Kodachrome is a less complex film to make than Ektachrome, only problem is that a processing lab is needed.
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