Inside the facility where Kodak brings film back to life | Hacker News Reader

Inside the facility where Kodak brings film back to life

popsci.com

52 pointssohkamyung25 comments

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Glad to see they're bringing Ektachrome back. Years ago, I took a photography class that was B&W, except for the week we did color with Ektachrome. The instructor selected a few slides from everyone and we watched it together. It was mesmerizing in a way I've never seen photography before. Part of that was the large-scale, projected images, with exquisite detail that you just can't get (yet) from digital.

Probably you are referring to "Kodakchrome", which was actually amazing quality. Ektachrome was the cheaper, simpler to develop positive film.

There is something unique about projected slides onto a good screen. The shadow details combined with just the size of the image can be quite impressive.

Kodakchrome produced great color images, but the chemistry to process it was fairly complex as well as toxic.

When next day processing was really taking off (the 80s?) Kodachrome was AFAIR the only media that had to be sent off to Kodak for processing. Complexity and toxicity explains that. Its wiki page is a sort of black hole to lose time in. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodachrome

Later Ektachromes were pretty good. By the time Kodachrome went away, there wasn't really a Kodachrome 25 replacement but the 100 ISO Ektachromes were very high quality.

I get re-directed to here: https://www.popsci.com/consent.php

And then out of curiosity I clicked on 'View List of Cookies Used on this Site'. Wow. There's HUNDREDS of Cookies!

Total overkill on the tracking there, PopSci.com

Yeah, 445, eg one from bumlam.com "suuid3" with 20 year expiry and under the "unclassified" category. 29 are stated as "necessary", 10 as "preferences", 46 statistics, 266 marketing, 94 unclassified.

226 marketing cookies. Nope.

GDPR madness is eating every publisher‘s brain...

Yeah, meanwhile the actual user friendly solution is simple. Make the no-tracking no-bullshit version the default one, and add an opt-in somewhere, maybe in a banner at the top.

Something like "on average we receive 2 cents from your visit because we take your personal data and sell it to the highest bidder. Either accept these 362 cookies, or click here to pay us 2 cents".

Maybe they could lure you with more content or something. GDPR states that people must opt-in into tracking, but you can still refuse to show them stuff if they don't.

The current implementations seem like the pages want people to hate the EU: "look at what those suits made us do to our previously simple and beautiful page"

It just makes me hate the page. Well not hate, just "dismiss" the page. This site has none of these requirements, and just goes to show it's not required.

If I load this link in lynx from a machine in the US, I don't even have to reject any cookies, thus proving they don't need any cookies to serve their content.

I live in Rochester, NY and my brother-in-law works as a mechanic on coating machines. Glad to see he's still got some time before he needs to change jobs.

I read that Kodak's downturn freed up a lot of chemical engineers and other skilled/techy people. Did any company ever capitalize on the surplus talent pool? Rochester has such a low cost of living it always seemed like a no brainer.

The film market has stabilised, and is now actually seeing slightly rising sales.

I wonder if any major camera manufacturers have any plans to reintroduce film cameras, currently Leica is the only company still manufacturing decent film cameras (those Lomography things barely count as cameras), Nikon is selling new old stock, and Canon just sold its last film camera a few weeks ago.

I'm also interested to see if we get more colour film manufactures entering the game. Fuji is possibly killing off their film business (except Instax) as they haven't been able to scale down their production, which would leave Kodak with a monopoly on colour film.

Decent camera is way underestimated when talking about Leica film camera, it's like saying Tesla is a decent car. I don't think more companies will reintroduce film cameras though.

No one at the scale of Nikon, Canon, or Fuji is going to come out with new film cameras. Rollei and Hasselblad gave up a few years back, and they, like Leica, were somewhat less dependent on the mass market. Fuji tried a few years back to introduce a new medium format folder (the GF670), which was reportedly pretty nice but just too damn expensive to find a market, not when the world is still awash in a sea of older but still serviceable cameras.

Canon has stopped selling the EOS-1V, it's last film camera [1] at the end of May 2018.

[1] https://www.cnet.com/news/canon-just-stopped-selling-its-las...

It's hard to imagine anyone making any significant investments in new film cameras even if there are a few essentially novelty designs here and there. And I have to believe there's enough used gear floating around to meet market demand essentially indefinitely. Take a typical midrange film SLR to a used camera store and they'll basically laugh at you in my experience.

I shoot a lot of Fujichrome positive film in 35mm and 120 formats. It will be nice to have another option available, because sometimes it seems like Fuji really doesn't want to be in the film business anymore.

I've got a cartridge of Super 8 Ektachrome in my freezer from 2012 that I've been saving. It sounds like maybe I can go ahead and use it without worrying that I'm wasting it, assuming that the new Ektachrome will be available in Super 8 eventually.

One of fujifilm companies located in south carolina now, thye use to process them in mexico. Fujifilm processes those disposable cameras that are still very popular at weddings, etc. People buy a bunch of them and set them on tables, so guests can use them.

You mail them in, the film gets processed, and the plastic camera gets cleaned and recycled and re-sold.

If you wondered where they went, its in the USA now.

This new production is provide film for Kodak's new super8 cameras.

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