Mamiya RB67 last frame cut off

[Jeremy Mudd]

I thought it was relevant. Excuse me for posting.

Jeremy

 

[Donald Qualls]

I thought it was relevant. Excuse me for posting.

Jeremy

Sorry, didn't mean to come down on you -- just that the pod coffee industry has kind of given itself a black eye in several ways. For someone who drinks one cup a day (or a couple with low consumption who prefer different blends), it may be a reasonable alternative to a grinder and drip machine or other coffee maker -- might even give you fresher coffee. The environmental side of pod coffee, combined with the cost of the pods, however, as well as the originators of the design practicing the usual "bad actor" business methods (trying to use trademarks like patents and prevent third parties from offering more economical or even reusable pods -- same tricks ink jet printer manufacturers have gotten slapped down for) makes it a non-starter for me. I'm not a young hipster who's just discovering good coffee, either; I used to buy Starbuck's drip coffee when it was mostly single-origin coffees and they sold a "coffee of the day" that was often something I'd never seen before (and a couple times something I've never seen again since, to my regret).

For what i suggested re: reusable 35mm cassettes to work would depend on the entire industry being on board: Kodak, Fuji, Ilford, Ferrania, ORWO, Foma, Lucky -- everyone who packages film for sale in 35mm cassettes, at least outside China. Just as deposits on beverage cans and bottles don't work if you can't get the store to actually pay you to take them back, it would have to start with all film retailers accepting return of used cassettes. The pre-printed mailers would be the second wave. And I'm very much afraid that for the entire industry to be on board, it would have to be the law in at least one major market -- USA or Europe -- that all 35mm cassettes be subject to deposit, printed with deposit value and return information (like nickel cans used to be, before the four states that had them stopped bothering), and all retailer, brick and mortar or online, must accept them back and pay the deposit refund.

Otherwise, most 35mm film cassettes and spools (which are plastic, even in the metal cassettes) will wind up in landfills.

BTW, same idea could be applied to 120 spools -- also plastic, and also condemned to landfills in huge quantities, even though the film market is a few percent of what it was in the 1990s.

 

[Alan Edward Klein]

Sorry, didn't mean to come down on you -- just that the pod coffee industry has kind of given itself a black eye in several ways. For someone who drinks one cup a day (or a couple with low consumption who prefer different blends), it may be a reasonable alternative to a grinder and drip machine or other coffee maker -- might even give you fresher coffee. The environmental side of pod coffee, combined with the cost of the pods, however, as well as the originators of the design practicing the usual "bad actor" business methods (trying to use trademarks like patents and prevent third parties from offering more economical or even reusable pods -- same tricks ink jet printer manufacturers have gotten slapped down for) makes it a non-starter for me. I'm not a young hipster who's just discovering good coffee, either; I used to buy Starbuck's drip coffee when it was mostly single-origin coffees and they sold a "coffee of the day" that was often something I'd never seen before (and a couple times something I've never seen again since, to my regret).

For what i suggested re: reusable 35mm cassettes to work would depend on the entire industry being on board: Kodak, Fuji, Ilford, Ferrania, ORWO, Foma, Lucky -- everyone who packages film for sale in 35mm cassettes, at least outside China. Just as deposits on beverage cans and bottles don't work if you can't get the store to actually pay you to take them back, it would have to start with all film retailers accepting return of used cassettes. The pre-printed mailers would be the second wave. And I'm very much afraid that for the entire industry to be on board, it would have to be the law in at least one major market -- USA or Europe -- that all 35mm cassettes be subject to deposit, printed with deposit value and return information (like nickel cans used to be, before the four states that had them stopped bothering), and all retailer, brick and mortar or online, must accept them back and pay the deposit refund.

Otherwise, most 35mm film cassettes and spools (which are plastic, even in the metal cassettes) will wind up in landfills.

BTW, same idea could be applied to 120 spools -- also plastic, and also condemned to landfills in huge quantities, even though the film market is a few percent of what it was in the 1990s.

How would that work if you only order a couple of 35mm cassettes rather than let's say a box of 5? Also, many sales are over the internet. No store to bring them back which would require a mailer for every cassette. I get Laserjet refills for my HP office printer that come with free FedEx mailer to return to HP in the same box the new cartridge was shipped in. But it's a $65 item, not a few dollars for a cassette. If you pass a law for such a minor item, you;d have to have returns for every plastic thing that is produced. Most of my house is plastic. Your camera is plastic or has a lot of plastic. What about the film itself. After all, if you're anything like me, most of my shots stink. How do we deal with throwing film into the garbage? Most plastic in the ocean comes from China, India and Africa. In America, it winds up in landfills not in the oceans. So it's not going anywhere that damages sealife.

One final note. Requiring manufacturers to handle disposing of cassettes will raise the cost of film. This will put more pressure on them to get out of the business as higher prices will reduce demand. Let's not shoot ourselves in the foot.

 

[MattKing]

FWIW, in days gone past Kodak recycled the millions of 35mm film cassettes that came back to them with exposed Kodachrome in them.
Recycled, but not re-used.
And the same applied to much of the film that was lab processed in the days when volumes were high.
And I have friends who use re-usable coffee pods and grind their own on demand .
I expect that the recycling that was done back then was probably less efficient than could be done now.
And on one further note, for opening crimped 35mm cassettes, one of these was the second best option:

The best option is one of these - available from Freestyle:

Here is the listing: https://www.freestylephoto.biz/1160...MIj77r19mi6wIVFyCtBh17Pw2ZEAQYAyABEgLqTPD_BwE

 

[Alan Edward Klein]

That's a great point Matt. I hadn't thought of that. Most 35mm cassette processing was done in labs or by the manufacturer, What did they do with 120 spools?

 

[MattKing]

That's a great point Matt. I hadn't thought of that. Most 35mm cassette processing was done in labs or by the manufacturer, What did they do with 120 spools?

Probably sent off to be melted down and re-used in some lower grade material.

 

[Donald Qualls]

Let's not shoot ourselves in the foot.

Rendering our planet uninhabitable isn't shooting ourselves in the foot? Oh, no, more like shooting ourselves in the head.

That's why the dollar deposit on a plastic cassette would only give a 60 cents refund on return: to pay the costs of handling along the lines for recycling or reuse. The key point is to minimize landfill waste flow and plastic in the environment. And yes, preferably, do it without killing the remainder of the film industry.

Of course, such deposits would have to apply to all plastics -- both goods and packaging. This is going to happen anyway, if we're not to do the same thing to the oceans we're already doing to the atmosphere.

In the really long term (centuries out) it seems inevitable that silver image photography and all its outgrowths (color film etc.) will become as much a "DIY" operation as oil paints are getting to be. Traditional oils are hard to get and expensive these days, with "water soluble oils" -- acrylics in all but name -- have taken over the bulk of that market. Then again, oil paints started (back in da Vinci's day) as something the artist made for himself. So did photographic plates. Both will eventually return to that level -- or do we realistically think it'll ever be reasonable to build a new film coating plant in Musk City, in a lava tube below the surface of Mars? Or cost effective to ship film there from Earth, with $300 shipping added for the weight of ever 35mm cassette?

 

[Bormental]

Rendering our planet uninhabitable isn't shooting ourselves in the foot? Oh, no, more like shooting ourselves in the head.

If you include enjoyment into your definition of "inhabitable", we're already too late. Too many people already, and the bottom half is in agony. One paper I'm too lazy to look up right now, estimated that carrying capacity of Earth is only 800 million people if you want them to have the quality of life comparable to a middle class of the 1st world countries (measured as energy consumption per capita IIRC)

 

[Donald Qualls]

If you include enjoyment into your definition of "inhabitable", we're already too late. Too many people already, and the bottom half is in agony. One paper I'm too lazy to look up right now, estimated that carrying capacity of Earth is only 800 million people if you want them to have the quality of life comparable to a middle class of the 1st world countries (measured as energy consumption per capita IIRC)

Except that only 800 million people wouldn't have been able to generate the production (of energy, materials, crops) for any but the wealthiest to actually live that way. They couldn't even maintain the infrastructure we have now if 90% of the population suddenly vanished.

With today's technology, we ought to be able to carry a couple billion in reasonable comfort -- but we have four times that many, and a power system that perpetuates inequality, so the richest can't even begin to spend their wealth, while most just struggle by (or less).

It may already be too late. The Sixth Extinction Event is already in progress, caused by our own species. If current "most likely" climate change levels actually occur, it's likely more than half of currently extant species (most of them invertebrates, because they comprise 90%+ of all species) will be gone by the end of the 22nd century, half of those by 2100. If just a few of those are ones we depend on for food production (like honeybees and other pollinators) we'll go with them. We might do so anyway, since non-domestic food species are some of the most at-risk (I forget how many people depend on fishing for their daily protein, but it's a high fraction -- and food fish are on their way out).

Which really has little to nothing to do with photography, other than, as I suggested before, that we, as citizens and consumers, can choose, to some extent, how much we do or don't contribute to our own fall.

 

[Bormental]

Well... that escalated quickly, quite depressing indeed. My thinking on this subject is (currently) heavily influenced by "The Collapse" by Jared Diamond.

 

[M Carter]

A RB67 Pro will not have all the lockouts found on a Pro S which will not have all the features/lockouts of a Pro SD.

I'm aware that the Pro-S introduced lockouts, frame guides and so on (I've shot a Pro-S for 35 years or so). But I've never heard there were more lockouts introduced with the SD, only that the lens throat changed and the backs rely on light traps instead of seals.

Can you tell us what additional interlocks were introduced after the Pro-S for the SD? This sounds little off to me...

 

[MattKing]

Can you tell us what additional interlocks were introduced after the Pro-S for the SD? This sounds little off to me...

There are none that I know of.
The SD version also added the capability of being usable with early versions of digital backs - thus the "D" in SD.