Strange new Fuji Film

roteague · Feb 7, 2006

Posted on Fuji website 15 December 2005:

"Fuji Photo Film Co., Ltd. (President and CEO: Shigetaka Komori; hereinafter referred to as "Fujifilm") announced that it had developed a silver halide Holographic* Film that can record and reproduce three dimensional (3-D) images using light interference phenomenon. Fujifilm will start selling the product in the US market next month."

Dead Link Removed

arigram · Feb 7, 2006

Does it come in 120 format?

kunihiko · Feb 7, 2006

30x40cm, 10 sheets / 299.99USD. That's what I read.

Ole · Feb 8, 2006

The only think I fins "strange" about this is that Fuji hasn't been making one before. But with Kodak increasingly leaving silver-based technology, and Slavich being relatively unknown (yet dominating the holography film market), Fuji must have decided there's room for one more player?

Marc Leest · Feb 8, 2006

Agfa was a leading manufacturer of holographic film. I guess Fujifilm sees an opportunity here.

arigram · Feb 8, 2006

What's a holographic film?

sanderx1 · Feb 8, 2006

arigram said:
What's a holographic film?

A film specially tailored to the making of holograms. holograms used to be made on plates a lot. Most hologram making these days is purely industrial and the artistic parts are entirely neglected.

Photo Engineer · Feb 8, 2006

arigram said:
What's a holographic film?

A holographic film is a regular B&W film with a label on it saying it is a holographic film. It makes it look more classy.

Seriously, if there is any change, it is a change in the spectral sensitizing dye present that is tailored to a specific laser wavelength. Somewhat similar to daylight and tungsten films, holographic films are sensitive to the laser imaging 'color'.

PE

arigram · Feb 8, 2006

Can one use these films for creative purposes without investing in serious laser machinery? How do they work? I am very curious.

Photo Engineer · Feb 8, 2006

arigram said:
Can one use these films for creative purposes without investing in serious laser machinery? How do they work? I am very curious.

They are nothing more than a B&W film. Many of them are very fine grained due to the high energy output of some lasers. They don't need high speed. They are designed for short exposures at high intensity, so sometimes reciprocity is not adjusted for longer camera exposures.

They have spectral sensitivity matched to a given laser wavelength. This is usually expressed in nanometers with either bandwidth or half band width specified as well.

Depending on the spectral sensitivity, they may have lower speed to daylight or tungsten than you would expect due to the type of sensitivity given to the film. It would be like having an ortho sensitive film or just a red sensitive film or something like that. One would have to expose it in a spectrosensitometer to predict speed and tone scale in advance, so a camera exposure would be the most useful as it is the easiest to do.

PE

pentaxuser · Feb 8, 2006

Does it have any practical characteristics that make it worth buying? Presumably Fuji has to believe it has a market for it. What would that market be?

Photo Engineer · Feb 8, 2006

pentaxuser said:
Does it have any practical characteristics that make it worth buying? Presumably Fuji has to believe it has a market for it. What would that market be?

Virtually any B&W film can be used for making holographs. The success is a matter of the efficiency of the film to interact with the laser light and then form the interference patterns. This BTW includes just about all B&W films anyhow as long as you test them first and use them under optimum conditions of exposure.

For many years, the Kodak Res Labs lobby had a large hologram on display right near the door. This was done with a normal B&W film AFAIK before there was any such thing as a 'holographic' film. Holograms were made with 'normal' films for years before anyone thought to package 'holographic' films with premium prices.

There is this bridge in Brooklyn that I can sell you cheap. Anyone interested? Does this help answer all of the questions out there?

PE

arigram · Feb 8, 2006

Yeah, how much is the bridge?

sanderx1 · Feb 8, 2006

Photo Engineer said:
A holographic film is a regular B&W film with a label on it saying it is a holographic film. It makes it look more classy.

Seriously, if there is any change, it is a change in the spectral sensitizing dye present that is tailored to a specific laser wavelength. Somewhat similar to daylight and tungsten films, holographic films are sensitive to the laser imaging 'color'.

PE

Only if you also claim microfilm films to be regular b&w materials with "microfilm" written on the box too. Because really , the holographic plates and films are more or less to microfilm what microfilm is to regular B&W materials. Not all of them are even silver based.

Photo Engineer · Feb 8, 2006

sanderx1 said:
Only if you also claim microfilm films to be regular b&w materials with "microfilm" written on the box too. Because really , the holographic plates and films are more or less to microfilm what microfilm is to regular B&W materials. Not all of them are even silver based.

Thanks. I was only referring to silver based films.

As for microfilm and regular film, due to contrast and imaging requirements, you usually cannot use microfilm for normal imaging and you cannot use regular film do make a good microfilm type image. It can be done.

In the case of silver based holographic imaging, that type of imaging was done and done very well years before any special film of any sort was designed for use with lasers. In the final analysis it is mostly optimization for short, high intensity exposures with a need for special spectral sensitization. But, in a pinch, any number of silver halide B&W films could be used, unlike the situation with microfilm.

There are a lot of non-silver microfilms around as well, at least there used to be.

In any event, there are, in my mind, more barriers and restrictions between normal and micro-films but fewer and less strict roadblocks between normal and laser-films. I have actually never witnessed any sort of suitable crossover between the first two but have personally witnessed the crossover between the second two types of photographic imaging.

Oh, and in terms of microfilm products, they are basically a high contrast fine grained B&W product, so there is nothing special about them except those two aim characteristics, but those aims are very very critical in getting the right image that can be magnified and viewed. Without high contrast and fine grain with low turbidity, you have no micro-film!

A laser hologram interference pattern is so forgiving that you can literally cut it up into pieces and each piece will reproduce the original image. Now, it is true that there is some degradation depending on the size of the pattern used, but it just illustrates the forgiving nature of a holographic image on film.

PE

sanderx1 · Feb 8, 2006

Photo Engineer said:
In the case of silver based holographic imaging, that type of imaging was done and done very well years before any special film of any sort was designed for use with lasers. In the final analysis it is mostly optimization for short, high intensity exposures with a need for special spectral sensitization. But, in a pinch, any number of silver halide B&W films could be used, unlike the situation with microfilm.

PE

Possibly, but people who do this as part of their jobs probably don't want to do things in a pinch if they can avoid it. As do many those doing things as their hobby. If one was in a pinch, you could do colour photography with narrow band filters and panchromatic film too and later combine to a colour image with extra filtration or possibly digitaly. people still really prefer to use colour film.

sanderx1 · Feb 9, 2006

roteague said:
Posted on Fuji website 15 December 2005:

"Fuji Photo Film Co., Ltd. (President and CEO: Shigetaka Komori; hereinafter referred to as "Fujifilm") announced that it had developed a silver halide Holographic* Film that can record and reproduce three dimensional (3-D) images using light interference phenomenon. Fujifilm will start selling the product in the US market next month."

Dead Link Removed

Just to inject some information into this all - there are specs here http://www.slavich.com/technical.htm for the products of one existing maker of holographic matterials, if you are interested in how these differ from the "more normal " materials.

Photo Engineer · Feb 9, 2006

sanderx1 said:
Just to inject some information into this all - there are specs here http://www.slavich.com/technical.htm for the products of one existing maker of holographic matterials, if you are interested in how these differ from the "more normal " materials.

You will note there that there is no mention of reciprocity nor curve shape which are essential parameters of a 'true' holographic film.

Hmmmm. Something lacking there?

When you introduce or sell a product for a special purpose, ALL characteristics for the product that relate to its specific use should be detailed. This inclueds exposure time range and curve shape as well as wedge spectrograms. For further information on this, look at the Kodak web site for such data.

Slavich may have a very good product, but the data available tells me nothing either way.

PE

holobrain · May 11, 2006

Holography

Hi, I'm an Holographer from Norway. If you have some questions about holography please do not hessitate asking me For the moment I'm making holograms on BB-plates from the UK, but I'v allso used Slavich film from Geola, Agfa and I'm waiting for some film from Fuji. Holographical film/plates are NOT suitable for Photography! Thanks

meltronic · May 15, 2006

Sorry, but aren't holograms printed on some kind of silvery-looking mylar film? How can a B&W emulsion produce all those color effects?

Donald Qualls · May 15, 2006

Many years before holograms were printed on reflective Mylar or similar material, they were made on glass plates or photographic film. In fact, holography predates the invention of the laser; the first holograms were made with mercury vapor light, filtered to make it monochromatic, IIRC in the 1930s (the first ruby laser was demonstrated in about 1957, as I recall). Lasers made it easier because they produce bright, monochromatic, and spatially coherent light.

I've seen white light viewable rainbow holograms on what was originally B&W film -- the colors are produced by phase interference; differences in thickness of the emulsion between exposed, developed, and bleached regions vs. unexposed regions on a phase hologram produce both the colors and the inteference patterns that produce the three dimensional real image. In fact, the first phase hologram I saw predated the introduction of reflective mylar...

r-s · May 28, 2006

On the topic of interference effect films, rather than one more holographic film, usable only by a select few with the requisite (and expensive/massive) hardware, I'd like to see someone bring to market a Lippmann process color film -- the only TRUE color emulsion ever created. (The Foveon sensor is tangentially/conceptually related to Lippmann's work, but it really doesn't even approach what he accomplished. For all its "innovative" aspects, Foveon's product remains a mere three-color platform, as well as a "D"-thing.)

The fact that Lippmann's discovery happened back in the late 1800s only adds to the mystique.

I don't think the current brouhaha over mercury need be an obstacle either. There are other room-temperature "liquid metals" available today, without the alleged safety issues affecting mercury usage.

nworth · May 30, 2006

Photo Engineer said:
Virtually any B&W film can be used for making holographs. The success is a matter of the efficiency of the film to interact with the laser light and then form the interference patterns. This BTW includes just about all B&W films anyhow as long as you test them first and use them under optimum conditions of exposure.

...

PE

I recall that one of the most successful earlier holographic films was Technical Pan (and before it the SO High Resolution Plate). If there is some speed to the new Fuji film, it might be worthy of a few experiments in cameras.

Claire Senft · May 30, 2006

At the prices mentioned I will experiment elsewhere.

William R. Alschuler · Oct 27, 2006

Holographic film is black and white, with possible sensitization in a color range tied to the user's laser color (as mentioned above), or it could be panchromatic. However, it has two characteristics that distinguish it from ordinary B/W film: to record a hologram you need a resolution of 3,000 lines per mm, better 5,000 or 10,000 (the latter if you want to record blue or all visible colors). The information recorded, normally without a lens or mirror for focusing, is an interference pattern and the pattern's scale of detail is set by the wavelength of light (visible light has wavelengths between about 4/10,000s and 6.8/10,000s of a mm). Ordinary high resolution film resolves about 125 lines per mm. Since the resolution of holographic film is 50 to 100xs normal, the speed is correspondingly less, around ASA 0.5. It also lacks antihalation backing, since many holograms require the laser light to travel both ways through the emulsion. Emulsions are made on both film and glass plates. Makers include Slavich, Color Holographics, Yves Gentet, and now Fuji. (Agfa and Ilford both withdrew from the market.) It can be used for non-holographic art purposes, but keep the slow speed and lack of antihalation in mind. People here interested in holography might look at the forum Holographyforum.org.

Strange new Fuji Film

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