Death of Kodachrome belies technological leap it represented(arstechnica.com)
arstechnica.com
Death of Kodachrome belies technological leap it represented
http://arstechnica.com/media/news/2009/06/death-of-kodachrome-belies-the-technological-advance-it-represented.ars
5 comments
Kodachrome
You give us those nice bright colors
You give us the greens of summers
Makes you think all the world's a sunny day, oh yeah!
I got a Nikon camera
I love to take a photograph
So Mama, don't take my Kodachrome away!
The discontinuation for us K-14 film fans was a sad moment, yeah. Worldwide stocks of K64 depleted in two days.. Not sure what I do when my last few dozen rolls are out - maybe should ditch color photography altogether :)
Sad too is that Kodachrome was something that Kodak could have exploited as a market differentiator, but didn't. No other slide film had the same process or the same archival quality. Supposedly someone had invented a one-hour K-14 process or machine, but Kodak would not license it to be used.
This is sad news. I really hope a company emerges with some resolve to support those who continue to shoot on film as an artistic choice. I'm all for jumping headlong into the digital world, but fact is film still has that little bit of something extra that you just can't get anyplace else.
My Dad took thousands of slides of family events through the years, all kodachrome. When the family was contemplating scanning them and putting them on CD or other media for backup, I said that the best archival material was likely to be kodachrome itself.