Kodachrome

Kodak have announced that Kodachrome is to be discontinued.

I've been using Kodachrome in one form or another for nearly forty years. I first encountered Kodachrome 64 in 126 cartridges in the early 1970s, progressing to the wonderful fine-grained Kodachrome 25 when I bought my first 35mm camera, a Zorki 4K, in 1977. By the time that Kodachrome 200 was introduced, I'd got an SLR with some faster lenses, making year-round use possible. Finally, when I bought myself a medium-format camera, there was Kodachrome 64 in 120 rolls.

Now, only the 35mm version of Kodachrome 64 is left, and it looks as if it will only be in the shops for a few more months.

I'm not really surprised by this, since film use is declining rapidly as the quality of digital cameras rises, but...

Kodachrome first appeared in the 1930s. It's always been a difficult film to process, and there have only ever been a few labs that felt it was worthwhile to invest in the equipment needed to process it. Its colour rendering isn't the best available, but it's always been predictable and, more importantly, it's stable: Kodachrome colours stay the same as they were on the day the film was processed.

I've been looking through some old slides dating back to the 1950s. The Ilford has deteriorated badly; the Fujichrome which produced better colours than Kodachrome in the 1970s now has a strong purple cast; the colours of Adox and Perutz are still very good, but those films haven't been made for years. Only Kodachrome and Ektachrome are still the same, and I think that I prefer the colours of the former. I could get very sentimental about the imperfect colours of Orwochrom or the coarse grain of GAF 500, but I won't go into that now.

Kodak are recommending Professional Ektar 100 and Professional Ektachrome E100G as potential replacements. I'll try them both, as part of my strategy of shooting film backups of my digital work, but things will never be quite the same again.