Kodak ‘Investigating What it Would Take’ to Bring Back Kodachrome

[Vonder]

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.

That's interesting. Since Kodachrome retains silver, and thus you can't use dust reduction technologies, I found it nearly impossible to scan. You must have a very clean environment.

 

[twelvetone12]

Kodachrome does not retain silver, all of it is removed in the bleach.

 

[wy2l]

In my book, "Investigating" means the public relations department said "let's run this up the flag pole and see who salutes it!".
Causes lots of false activity, makes people feel a tingle down their leg, and nothing gets done.
This technique is used by politicians of all stripes - it's easy to deny, and keeps their name in the press.

I just believe about 0.00314159% of what Kodak Public Relations / Advertising / Investor Relations says. Lips move, nice things are said, and nothing happens.

I hope I'm wrong. Only time and Kodak will tell. Will be happy to eat crow when Kodachrome is again in production.

 

[Vonder]

Kodachrome does not retain silver, all of it is removed in the bleach.

Really? I don't know why I was never able to get good scans of it then. I'd have a nice, clean, perfect little image (to my eye at least) and couldn't for the life of me get a decent scan. Color was off, exposure was off, too much dust showing up, etc.

 

[480sparky]

I never had any issues scanning my old K25s.

Muddy, brown skies?!?!?!!?

 

[Prof_Pixel]

PE do you know if kodachrome was ever coated with the machine in B38?

The problem isn't in coating the film - it's the process (and process control) that's the issue.

 

[twelvetone12]

Yes I know. But I did not say that coating was or was not any problem. I'm just curious to know if the coating operation was moved to the machine in b38, that's all.

 

[pentaxuser]

In my book, "Investigating" means the public relations department said "let's run this up the flag pole and see who salutes it!".
Causes lots of false activity, makes people feel a tingle down their leg, and nothing gets done.
This technique is used by politicians of all stripes - it's easy to deny, and keeps their name in the press.

I just believe about 0.00314159% of what Kodak Public Relations / Advertising / Investor Relations says. Lips move, nice things are said, and nothing happens.

Well 5 pages of us on APUG have saluted it since yesterday. However if it really is "Kodak executives" running from the mouth in public without real thought and an almost zero chance of it happening then Kodak may live to regret the damage to its credibility this kind of thing can have.

pentxuser

 

[Wayne]

Well 5 pages of us on APUG have saluted it since yesterday. However if it really is "Kodak executives" running from the mouth in public without real thought and an almost zero chance of it happening then Kodak may live to regret the damage to its credibility this kind of thing can have.

pentxuser

We've entered the brave new trumpian world of no such thing as bad publicity. Kodak is probably happy anyone even knows they still exist.

 

[Wallendo]

Really? I don't know why I was never able to get good scans of it then. I'd have a nice, clean, perfect little image (to my eye at least) and couldn't for the life of me get a decent scan. Color was off, exposure was off, too much dust showing up, etc.

There is something in Kodachrome which blocks infrared light. This makes use of dust removal and scratch removal impractical. Blemishes have to be removed manually. I have never had issues with color reproduction, and the only exposure issues have come from me initially improperly exposing the film in camera.

 

[falotico]

Well, I guess we will have to get used to it: Kodachrome is the vampire that would not die. It hangs around in urban legend like the second gun on the grassy knoll, or the dream that the Beatles might get back together. I think the situation is that it produces beautiful images that you tend to appreciate only years after they were made. I can think of no other color stock that can deliver such a magnificent image sixty years after the shutter was snapped. A box of slides can be kept in a drawer for decades and when you find one you just have to hold one of the photographs up to the light to see what is on it. You can never do that with a digital chip. Kodachrome has a near perfect design for nostalgia.

 

[Sirius Glass]

I learned to get the photograph right in the viewfinder before I took the shot. For decades the slide was the final product of the photograph, no burning, no dodging, shown as shot with very rare cropping. But now I have moved on to working with prints and I am not interested in going back to taking slides. I welcome the reintroduction of Ektachrome and I will wait and see if Kodachrome zombie arises from the dead. I wish the return of slide film, but I moved on back while slides were still popular. I will not be stockpiling slide film.

 

[pdeeh]

Well 5 pages of us on APUG have saluted it since yesterday. However if it really is "Kodak executives" running from the mouth in public without real thought and an almost zero chance of it happening then Kodak may live to regret the damage to its credibility this kind of thing can have.

pentxuser

but, in all truth, a bit of a palaver at APUG is almost certainly of zero interest to anyone outside APUG.
If Kodak based its development, R&D, sales & marketing efforts on what they read here ... well, you can fill in the rest

 

[MattKing]

Really? I don't know why I was never able to get good scans of it then. I'd have a nice, clean, perfect little image (to my eye at least) and couldn't for the life of me get a decent scan. Color was off, exposure was off, too much dust showing up, etc.

Kodachrome slides are really thin - so thin, that the surface of the slide actually has a fair amount of physical relief that corresponds with the dense parts of the slide. If you look at the surface of a Kodachrome slide, you can actually see the relief with the naked eye.
That uneven surface defeats the infra-red based dust elimination systems.
As for colour problems, that is a combination of software problems and, potentially, the interaction between the light source and optics of some scanners, and those thin and sharp and dense layers in a well exposed Kodachrome slide. Most good scanners can handle Kodachrome well, but it is sufficiently different from other films that it requires a different set of settings in software.

 

[Marcelo Paniagua]

There is something in Kodachrome which blocks infrared light. This makes use of dust removal and scratch removal impractical. Blemishes have to be removed manually. I have never had issues with color reproduction, and the only exposure issues have come from me initially improperly exposing the film in camera.

Agree. Same thing happens with my scanner when I do B/W (which is most of the time). Need to remove scratch and dust with Gimp or something else.

Regards

 

[Nzoomed]

There are two points here:

There is, in recent years, a definite trend towards nostalgia in numerous products and designs. An obvious example is vinyl discs....it is unarguably easier to use CD's, MP3's and downloads, all with excellent quality. But some (including myself) still like the sound quality and querks of vinyl, and are willing to pay for costly discs and high-end turntables. Why should Kodachrome be different.

And not all photography is about "ultra-accurate" colours (whatever that may be...all our eyes and brains see colour differently). But, if that is the only criteria, why do we bother with B&W, sepia toning, cyanotypes and all the other processes ? And maybe there is also some nostalgia, or at least intellectural or artistic interest in using old processes ? For that matter, why do artists still use paper, paint or coloured pencils, when a digital image is quicker, easier and a more accurate record ?

I completley agree!
Ive been trying to make this point for ages!

 

[Photo Engineer]

Kodachrome was coated in B38 AFAIK.

PE

 

[Roger Cole]

You've come crawling back. Yes, that would be nice.

Crawling?

I'm not crawling anywhere. I've been busy with life and too many hobbies to begin to pursue them all, much less devote online time to talking about them.

 

[faberryman]

Well 5 pages of us on APUG have saluted it since yesterday. However if it really is "Kodak executives" running from the mouth in public without real thought and an almost zero chance of it happening then Kodak may live to regret the damage to its credibility this kind of thing can have.

Credibility? I moved to Ilford and Fuji years ago.

 

[Theo Sulphate]

... If one tasted one next to the other, one would notice the difference, however leaving months in between for the old stock to disappear for a while meant that the Coke Classic could be foisted on the public. ...

Not to go too far afield, but the same has happened to Cheetos. The Cheetos today is salty, thin, brittle, and has a poor semblance of a cheese taste. The Cheetos of the 1960's and 70's had far less salt, was thick and not brittle, and had a wonderful cheese taste. I don't know when the change happened.

But don't worry about Kodachrome being re-introduced - the Cubs will win the World Series and an unlikely outsider will be elected President before that ever happens.

Also, I have to say that these announcements and speculations have totally ruined the April 1st gag I had planned.

 

[Craig]

The cherry on top would be MGB's circa 1967-1971 design (without Lucas Electrical systems).

That's a Mazda Miata/MX5.

 

[Prof_Pixel]

Kodachrome Cyan Dye issues.

From Ron Andrews, Kodak Kodachrome guru: see http://photo.net/film-and-processing-forum/00S7ZR

The cyan dye in Kodachrome gets blamed for all sorts of problems: some real and some imagined. The K-14 cyan dye is different from the cyan dyes in most other films. It peaks at a longer wavelength and extends into the infrared region. Here are a few of the effects I know about:

• It affected the design of EDupe film which has a very long red spectral sensitivity peak. The peak sensitivity is positioned at one of the two points where Ektachrome and Kodachrome cyan dyes will produce about the same contrast. It is necessary to use a different filterpack with Kodachrome to get the color balance right. For those labs who were too lazy to switch filtration depending on the original, there was an IR304 dichroic filter that allowed both Ektachrome and Kodachrome to be printed with the same filter pack. It also resulted in high cyan contrast in the dupes of Kodachrome. This was the earliest instance of comments that Kodachrome is hard to reproduce.
• The K-14 cyan dye affects the IR channel in ICE equipped scanners. (The relief image does too.) While there is a real effect, it is barely noticable in my Minolta scanner. I routinely use ICE for my Kodachrome scans.
• The K-14 cyan dye tends to crystalize producing increased graininess. The slope of grain vs. speed is far steeper for the red record of K-14 than anything else. This is why K-200 is so grainy compared to E-200. This is also one of the reasons K-400 was never introduced. (Ron Mowrey and colleagues had a partial solution, but I'll let him describe it.)
• The K-14 cyan dye requires different scanner settings from E-6 films. This is another reason why many claim that "Kodachrome doesn't scan well."

If you want to see the results of many different scans of many different Kodachrome images, go to http://ronald.andrews.googlepages.com/kodachrome

 

[Craig]

Outside the USA, Kodachrome was always sold with processing included and it was sent back to Kodak for developing, so I don't think that would be a problem for those who used it before. Always used to take about a week to get the slides back, but I have no idea where they went for processing.

 

[MattKing]

Outside the USA, Kodachrome was always sold with processing included and it was sent back to Kodak for developing, so I don't think that would be a problem for those who used it before. Always used to take about a week to get the slides back, but I have no idea where they went for processing.

Between 1961 and 1984 they went from Calgary to the Kodak processing lab in North Vancouver, BC.
If you dropped them off at a Kodak dealer, they were picked up daily, sent by overnight courier to the lab, processed and mounted the next day and returned by overnight courier for delivery the following day to the dealer.
If you sent them by mail, the same schedule applied, except the to and fro transport was done by the Post Office, and you got the results in your mail (in many cases delivered right to your door).
All for no extra charge (although near the end some of the dealers tried to levy small handling fees).
All of which was administered under the capable gaze of my father, whose management responsibilities included all but the development and mounting parts of that process - at least until his retirement in 1983.
Some people were under the impression that the mailing envelope that came with the film was what insured that you didn't have to pay extra for the processing. In actuality, it was the labeling on the film cassette. The envelopes were there as a convenience.
Here is one of many versions of my Dad's card:

 

[flavio81]

If you want to see the results of many different scans of many different Kodachrome images, go to http://ronald.andrews.googlepages.com/kodachrome

Professor,

Thank you very much for this interesting information. BTW the updated link to the page you linked is:

http://www.randrews4.com/kodachrome.html

It is an excellent page, thank you very much!!