Kodak Kills Kodachrome 399
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by
timothy
from the and-try-to-find-tri-x-pan dept.
from the and-try-to-find-tri-x-pan dept.
eldavojohn writes "Another sign that digital cameras are slowly phasing out analog comes with Kodak's announcement to discontinue Kodachrome film. This should come as no surprise as Polaroid film was phased out long ago. At least the analog photography industry knows how to change with the times."
Take Kodachrome if you must ... (Score:5, Insightful)
But Mama don't take my Velvia [wikipedia.org] away!
Umm.... (Score:1, Insightful)
"At least the analog photography industry knows how to change with the times."
The analogue photo industry was FORCED to change with the times. They did not control the distribution of Digital Cameras and printing paper. If they had, we might never have seen the advance in CCD technology that we now have....
Re:The ultimate irony (Score:2, Insightful)
No; all that's happened is that digital as a format has proven that, in most cases, photos genuinely aren't worth all that much.
As far as people are concerned, photography is basically an attempt to evade death, and not one that works well. I'm guessing most digital photos probably last about as long as they actually should.
Life is transient.
no, not really a sign at all (Score:5, Insightful)
Another sign that digital cameras are slowly phasing out analog
this is not a sign of anything. the article is being used by the submitter in an attempt to prove a point that he wants to make. in fact, if you read the entire article the assertion of the summary is clearly not supported. this film is hard to develop and there is only one lab in the US that does so. it also is among the worst-selling film that Kodak makes:
Kodachrome accounted for less than 1 percent of the company's total sales of still-picture films
so the story here is that Kodak got rid of the bottom selling film of their line. companies do that all the time, and this has nothing to do with digital cameras. film is still sold pervasively and easy developed at dozens of establishments in most towns.
Re:The ultimate irony (Score:5, Insightful)
Film stock is extremely unstable. One of the major problems in preserving old motion pictures is that the reels of film fuse together. (In fact, most active film restoration projects involve carefully digitizing the movies for preservation). If you have carefully separated your negatives, and store them in a temperature and humidity controlled environment, you can slow down the deterioration, but not stop it altogether.
Prints from both digital and film sources are essentially identical - if you use the best technologies (pH neutral paper, etc) your prints from both medium will last about the same time. Unfortunately, of course, people tend to use the cheapest solution, not the best available solution - but that is a market choice, not a failing of the technology involved.
Re:The ultimate irony (Score:5, Insightful)
how on earth is this insightful. Your telling me your family doesn't have an album, no wedding pictures, baby pictures ? The fact is they are priceless. I personally have processed 20 rolls of film since last year. The reason being I'm documenting time. If I had a dime for everyone who had a digital camera, a HD full of pictures and not a single hard copy to show for it.
The reason digital camera's are taking over is because it caters to a basic human trait .. laziness !!! I predict there will be a backlash when in ten years when no one no longer has there pictures. I still have pictures my father took back in the 50's not to mention I still have his old camera.
Re:And it is good because? (Score:3, Insightful)
Kodachrome is the only slide film not prone to color shifting.
When they removed the slow K-14 films from their line I bout 2 cases and popped them in the freezer.
Guess I'll have to use them in short order lest the chemistry goes away too :(
I still have 4 rolls of Konica SRG-3200 in deep freeze. I'm saving that for a special need.
It's the only 3200 film ever made that can see IR through UV, and it was in color.
-nB
Polaroid To Bring Back Polaroids (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:And it is good because? (Score:3, Insightful)
Like all other technologies, its not the features, its what you do with them. I've taken good pictures and some Interesting things [youtube.com] with my $600 Canon digital rebel xti.
Amen to that. We paid a professional photographer $1600 to cover our wedding... but a couple of my favorite pictures were taken by my cousin with a free disposable camera. They're all about the timing and the framing (and catching the photographer ordering us around ;-).
Slowly? (Score:3, Insightful)
"digital cameras are slowly phasing out analog"
I would argue that the transition from analog to digital was actually remarkably quick. The last analog camera I bought was in 2000, I think. Also, cell phones and small point and shoots effectively replaced disposable cameras years ago.
My guess is the only people who used film after 2005 are *some* professionals and artists.
Re:no, not really a sign at all (Score:3, Insightful)
> attempt to prove a point that he wants to make.
Man, I agree completely. I'm surprised that this was posted as is. I guess there's no editorial process operating here at all.
In 60 years, hold up a Kodachrome slide next to a compact optical disk and see which was is still usable.
I call digital photography "temporary photography."
I shoot digital myself, occasionally, but I'm not kidding myself about it.
--Richard
Re:The ultimate irony (Score:5, Insightful)
Historians in 250 years time will be very interested in your holiday snaps. It won't matter that they aren't well taken etc, they will still tell them a lot about life in the early 2000s.
Re:The ultimate irony (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:The ultimate irony (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:The ultimate irony (Score:3, Insightful)
Why not send your mother and father some CD's of the digital photos you want to restore? "Offsite backup" can really be as simple as that - send some discs or USB flash drives with stuff you want preserved to family or friends who live in a different building. Put some in a safe-deposit box in a bank if you have no one to send them too (or just want additional offsite copies).
In my experience, the real biggest 'problem' caused by digital photography is people don't tend to throw away the dreck. My parents have several thousand of photos -and they've only had a digital camera for 3 or 4 years. I want to try to get them to go through them and delete stuff that isn't really their best work or very important.
I heard someone on the radio once joking that the difference between a good photographer and a bad one is that the good photographer throws away their bad photos.
Re:The ultimate irony (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:no, not really a sign at all (Score:3, Insightful)
so the story here is that Kodak got rid of the bottom selling film of their line. companies do that all the time, and this has nothing to do with digital cameras. film is still sold pervasively and easy developed at dozens of establishments in most towns.
Oh, don't be disingenuous. Digital is clearly killing off niche photographic product development and manufacture. Kodachrome was successful because it offered fantastic color representation, at once vivid and subtle, and combined it with what was once considered razor-fine grain... but because it's an oddball process, Kodak has little incentive to continue its development now that sales of all film have tanked, and E6-process films have caught up with it in terms of grain, if not color representation*.
Color process film is devilishly hard to make, and requires complex photo processing to be developed right along with it, so as the mass market dries up, the "long tail" of products for the enthusiast gets lopped right off. Black and white film will be around forever, because it's (relatively) simple to make, and any hobbyist can concoct their own B&W developer and fixer at home with a little research. Color film will last only until the cost of a "disposable" digital camera comes in line with a film one, at which point color rollfilm becomes a hobbyist's toy, and as such, unprofitable and discontinued, right up and down the entire product line.
(*As an aside - Velvia sucks. Hard. Provia F is about the only game in town for top-tier chrome if you don't like slide film that turns blue skies purple. No, Velvia F, you still suck. Ektachrome is nice for studio product shots or something, I guess, but the only film that will make me go "Wow!" when I peer through the loupe is Provia F and 400.)
Re:The ultimate irony (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously, I don't know what's made you so emo, and I was just going to mod you down, but honestly, even people's most banal pictures can become important. I was an Asian Studies major in college and seeing photos from Japan's Meiji and Taisho periods was amazing. These are just family pictures or whatever.
When I lived in Yokohama, the city was celebrating 150 years since the port was opened and had hundreds of photos up of the city throughout that time.
Just because you're having fun in philosophy 101 doesn't mean photos can't be important.
Re:The ultimate irony (Score:5, Insightful)
There is still a little Kodachrome left. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:no, not really a sign at all (Score:3, Insightful)
Digital is clearly killing off niche photographic product development and manufacture.
ah, well, i am going to disagree there. i can't ignore the resurgence in interest in lomography [lomography.com] and the fact that chain retailers [urbanoutfitters.com] are selling the Holga. for example, redscale film [lomography.com] is just newly being manufactured so that you don't have to wind it yourself. i would argue that the niche is alive and well.
in my estimation, it is the mainstream casual photographers that have converted wholesale to digital. good riddance. most (like my parents) couldn't get a film snapshot that wasn't jacked up to save their lives. for casual point and shoot, digital is more convenient. if you don't know what you are doing with the camera, it is also much cheaper to throw away the 60% of your shots that are ruined by your lack of skills.
Re:The ultimate irony (Score:3, Insightful)
Backing up digital data for 100 years is actually pretty easy. Embed the data as a watermark in porn and post it on the Internet. :-)
But seriously, it is pretty easy. You start by realizing that you can't back it up for 100 years, but you can trivially back it up ten times for 10 years each. With analog media, you get degradation every time you make a copy of a copy, which makes long backup durations important. With digital data, this becomes moot.
Re:The ultimate irony (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The ultimate irony (Score:3, Insightful)
You're right, the previous post was not insightful and just shows that there is a serious lack of foresight into our future.
We're all so dammed obsessed with the present and we have a reckless disregard for both the past and the future. People ignore history and don't consider the impact decisions will have on the future. It spans everything from adopting fully-documented open standards for digital works (documents, audio and images) to erasure of privacy that humanity has worked hard to enact over many generations of oppression.
The big thing people care about now in photography is how they can snap silly pictures of their friends at a drunken party. Don't get me wrong, those are great and I have many... but it doesn't satisfy the fact that jpeg is a compressed file and the compression algorithms can be lost in time.
There will come a time where people will accept that analogue formats have their place alongside digital formats. Sure, analogue is bulky, unwieldy and has its problems with archival too... but we have documents that are more than 2000 years old. There is no guarantee that we'll have our digital works 2000 years from now. Rendering a digital work requires a computer and a power source. Rendering a Kodachrome print requires sunlight and your eyes.
I'm going back to film (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The ultimate irony (Score:3, Insightful)
I tend to agree. Negatives tend not to degrade nearly as much, both because the medium is more stable and because they are generally stored in darkness. Also, film scanners are designed to compensate for fading negatives. Print scanners don't expect to need to correct a washed out image. Finally, prints by their very nature throw away a significant portion of the contrast range of the original negative, so even a brand new print isn't as good as a proper negative scan.
This assumes you have a film scanner or a flatbed scanner whose software knows how to scan negatives, of course. Doing it with cheaper, dumber flatbed scanners is problematic at best. Been there, done that.... Ended up getting prints made and scanning those. :-)
Re:The ultimate irony (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Mama Took The Kodachrome Away (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously, this is a terrible shame, though hardly a surprise (here in the UK, we already have to post the exposed film to Kodak Switzerland, who forward it to the only lab in the world that can process the film, Dwayne's in Kansas). It's a bit like waking up one morning to hear that oil paints are no longer available, but acrylics should be an adequate substitute. Kodachrome is a truly unique film that works in a completely different way to any other emulsion, and gives a distinctive 'look' that no other film (let alone digital) can reproduce. Check out The Kodachrome Project [kodachromeproject.com] to see why some of us will miss it so much.
Re:The ultimate irony (Score:3, Insightful)
Don't get me wrong, those are great and I have many... but it doesn't satisfy the fact that jpeg is a compressed file and the compression algorithms can be lost in time.
Honestly? I could understand your concern if it was about some esoteric undocumented proprietary scheme.
But JPEG is an *incredibly* widely used format and there are countless programs that can process it (including ones that can resave it in uncompressed formats, if you're really that bothered.)
It's unlikely that things would get so bad that we couldn't even reverse engineer or understand JPEG (let alone run legacy decoding apps) yet we could still conveniently access and run the computer equipment necessary to read and display uncompressed formats. Any circumstances that prevent the former will almost certainly prevent the latter; worrying about compression is just silly.
Re:Wait for the "looks softer" crowd to form... (Score:2, Insightful)
It's will be a *very long time* before the pixels on a digital camera approach the size of a silver halide molecule.
It's not a silver halide molecule, it's a silver halide *grain*. The exposed/not exposed distinction is based on entire grains, not single silver atoms. The effective distance between grains on normal filmstock is going to be in the 1-10 micron range. For a 35mm negative, that's about 12 megapixels to 1,225 megapixels. A caveat, however, is that grains are binary - exposed or unexposed, whereas a digital camera pixel has multiple levels. If we go with 256 shades of gray, your 35 mm negative is more like a sub-megapixel to a 5 megapixel camera. (If we assume each "pixel" denotes a region where anywhere from 0-255 grains are exposed.) Of course, the effective resolution is a bit higher than this, as we can have situations where there is sub-pixel patterning, or if we use more limited pixel resolution (say 40 gray levels, versus 256).
The other issue is that since the grains are scattered randomly, and not laid out on a grid, the film negative will degrade more gracefully when enlarged. It won't show the pixelation artifacts, but don't be fooled into thinking that you're creating any more information. I don't know the grain size of the Velvia you're using, but assuming it's 3 microns, a 2 1/4" square negative contains only about 3.3 billion grains. Scanning for 55 megapixels makes sense if you're interested in the sub-pixel patterning, but don't be fooled into thinking you're getting the full 14 billion grain equivalent that a 55 megapixel 256 level greyscale digital capture would give you.
Re:Kodachrome?! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Where Film Still Beats Digital (Score:5, Insightful)
A $200 digital point-and-shoot will typically produce more noise at ISO's of say, 800 and up than an equivalently priced film point-and-shoot.
The fact that the very best digitals are capable of extreme ISO settings is relevant only to the few who can afford them.
Beyond that, film vs. digital is a pointless discussion. On the one hand, some diehards refuse to see any value in digital, and, on the other, some folks always equate "digital" with "better". Both positions are wrong.
There remains a strong community of film users. Whether film is "better" is not the point. The point is they like film. People who are cellphone shooters and think everything about photography can be summed up in megapixels and resolution might not understand.
Re:Attention! Please tag as !analog (Score:5, Insightful)
By your definition, no physical medium is analogue. After all, they're all made up of molecules and atoms, and other sub-atomic particles. Electricity (and electric devices) couldn't be analogue, among other things, the electron count is discrete.
Re:Attention! Please tag as !analog (Score:3, Insightful)
You could encode information in the "position" of the atoms. That would make the information analog (i.e., there is an infinite number of positions you can put an atom in, afaik).
Nope [wikipedia.org].