Tag: #believeinfilm

New Harman Red

Harman Technologies announced the Harman Red 125.

It’s a 35mm “redscale” negative film in the standard C-41 process. It’s a new emulsion based of the Phoenix colour film. Rated at 125 ISO it can be shot between 50 and 400 ISO for different effect. It comes in a 36 exposure roll.

DPReview has some more info.

Glad to see Harman investing in new films.

Kodak to clamp down on bulk loading

Apparently Kodak Alaris decided to restrict the sale of colour film in bulk, unless you are a movie production.

No more respooling to save on costs, which is what a lot of reseller were doing. Paying USD$8-9 for a roll of Ektachrome instead of USD$22 from Kodak was a significant saving.

As Kosmofoto reports, Reflx Lab says that its respooled colour film might not last long including the Cine film.

All of this coincide with them being sold to a private equity. Correlation is not causation, but coincidences are rare.

Previously: Kodak price updates and Kodak pauses film production for factory upgrades.

News: Kodak price updates

Kosmophoto tells us Kodak Alaris announces price rises for January 2025 – but Tri-X is getting cheaper:

In contrast to previous price increases, the majority of price increases will under 10%, with most falling between 5% and 8%.

It’s a mixed bag, some film raising in prices and some falling, with 120 rolls rising more than 135.

To be continued…

Previously: Kodak pauses film production for factory upgrades, Fujifilm film price increase, Price hike on Kodak film

News: Kodak pauses film production for factory upgrades

The Verge signals us that Kodak pauses film production for factory upgrades to help meet demand:

Eastman Kodak has temporarily paused all film production. The news comes as part of a shutdown in November allowing the company to upgrade and modernize its Rochester, New York factory,

I tried to not make the headline click-bait, like the bits I saw earlier this week.
This is actually a good news in which Kodak need to pause production to better produce, due to increased demand. Increased demand is good, as it means film is alive.

From Kosmo Photo:

In 2020, Eastman Kodak said demand for film had doubled between 2015 and 2019, after a decade-long period of decline following the start of consumer digital photography.

Let’s hope this is a positive signal from the previous news of Kodak photo businesses being sold to private equity.

Link: Pakon F235

Dante Stella tell us about the Kodak / Pakon F235 Plus high-speed film scanner:

First, it is designed for speed. An F235 Plus, for example, will do 800 frames an hour at 3000×2000 resolution (yes, that’s 33 rolls per hour, or a roll or 24 frames about every two minutes). With Digital ICE turned on, it still does 400 frames an hour.

Color correction. Kodak basically owns the world of color correction, and this machine nails the colors 99.5% of the time.

In sum, this is an exiting piece of equipment made accessible, sadly, by the collapse of commercial film processing.

I mentioned this previously as an alternative to the Frontier. Fujifilm vs Kodak. It’s sad nobody produce these and that the know how has disappeared, but then would they exist new at $2000 a piece? The used refurbished market from these seems to be the way to buy what cost much more initially.

The 2017 followup article: The Kodak/Pakon F235 Plus, revisited.

Previously: The magic of Fuji Frontier SP-3000

Link: The magic of Fuji Frontier SP-3000

Sebastian Schlüter wrote in 2018 about The magic of Fuji Frontier SP-3000.

Fuji Frontier is the product line moniker for minilab solutions from Fujifilm. In the early 2000 their minilab Fuji Frontier was the reference for film processing and printing, and one of its main attribute is that the printing phase was done digitally. Instead of optically enlarging the image, you put the source film transparency into the scanner, and it will print the images on photographic paper (RA-4 process). And the SP-3000 scanner, the latest model that was part of that minilab system, is still thought after as it produces high quality images out of the box. This was part of the magic (that can’t be distinguished from technology). Just to add how this was revolutionary, it allowed producing mini contact sheets, and it allowed printing slide film without intermediate negative or without inversible (positive) photographic paper. As a business, you could charge 5-10$ extra to store the scans used to print on a CD. Your 1 hour photolab likely used one of these, or its competitor like Noritsu, Agfa or Kodak.

One of the key point of the Frontier is that is does its work fast and automatically. Scanning is always a lengthy process and hard to tune to get good results. The Frontier integrates all of that. Other alternatives are Noritsu who offers a higher resolution, and Kodak Pakon, that requires 20+ years old Microsoft Windows XP to drive it, but is much smaller. Acquisition costs for a Frontier SP-3000 starts at CAD6,000 on the used market and the device takes a huge amount space, so does the Noritsu, and have the same requirement for maintaining the same operating system.

The film to digital workflow is either expensive, slow or poor quality. DSLR scanning provides a good DIY alternative that is reasonably priced if you already have the camera and a proper setup rival dedicated film scanner on many aspects.

Previously: How film commercial processing and scanning is done