Kodaks "S.O." films

Years ago Kodak used to make available "Special Order" films that had a stock number starting with the initials S. and O. S.O..

I think Tech Pan was one of these, as were other "special interest" films.

Now, it was my understanding that these films were actually produced for specific purposes but released to the consumer market under the S.O. title.

Kodak still has commercial/specific purpose films that are not generally available in consumer sizes, such as some very nice b/w aerial films. I wonder why Kodak doesn't do this anymore, since they already have the films?

Those specialist films were/are sold to the few customers who needed them as SO-XYZ or whatever. Their direct-pos copying film was an example; it started out as SO-015, and ended up as 4841 or something like that. If Kodak thought there would be a large enough market for a specialist material, then they would issue it with a regular 4-digit code and an official name; and in the old days even let people know it was for sale; in the catalog and with data sheets, sometimes even advertising. That costs a lot of money, and presumably EK doesn't imagine any profit to offset those costs. So don't expect any SO-films to turn into full-blown 'products' anytime soon.

I have some Kodak direct positive Duplicating film back in the UK, that has an S.0. number, and I had some other S.O. Kodak film which was a regular product, I think Tech Pan.

Likewise back in the early 80's the Ilford Ortho sheet film (the current version is called Ilford Ortho Plus) just had a special order number for a year or two, I was told at the time that this was because the emulsion was very slightly changed and might need slightly different exposure ordeveloment compared to the previous product, I never noticed a difference.

Ian

A quick Google of this gets a list of hits that suggest that the SO didn't only apply to films, but also perhaps to sizes of a film. Maybe this was a forerunner of the annual production of sheet film by Ilford which is usually well received on here?

http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=ko...s=org.mozilla:en-GB:official&client=firefox-a