Kodak's next move - sacking Elite Crome 100? And then there were 3...

[randall_pukalo]

I have noticed Kodak has removed Elite Chrome 100 (the very fine

grained, accurate color balanced stuff) at local stores in metro

Detroit area. Looks like Elite Chrome 400 (this outdated grain

monstrosity should be banned), Elite Chrome 200 (yes, good stuff, but

not as fine grained as EC100, and Elite Chrome Extra Color 100 are the

trio Kodak has established.

Kodak marketers - why not delete the worthless EC400, and leave us the

beautiful EC100. You know, extreme color saturation (100 extra color)

is great sometimes, but not always. EC100 was great for people shots.

[rich815]

So use Fuji Sensia 100. A much better film anyway IMO. Elite Chrome 100 was not all that bad but I often had problems in large, detailess areas like skies. Often found bits and spots of bad or "deformed" emulsion. Never have this with Sensia 100. Sensia 100 has seemed more consistent in it's colors for me too versus Elite Chrome 100.

[ilkka_nissila]

Elite chrome 100 is one of the most beautiful films that exist. I would be very surprised if this were a deliberate move on Kodak's part. I'm sure it's just your local stores that cut them out - not understanding anything about photography or alternatively not selling enough of them. Since no slide film higher than iso 100 is worth putting in a camera these days, I would think they would just cut out the 200 and 400 films.

[rowland_mowrey]

I've posted this just recently.

 

The major color film manufacturers have all seen a huge decline in sales of all reversal films. Negative film sales continue at a much higher pace by comparison.

 

There will come a day of reckoning for all of us when the transparency films become much less available, fewer in kind, and higher in price. Enjoy them while you can.

 

Digital marches on.

 

Ron Mowrey

[r.t. dowling]

Buy it online from B&H or Adorama. It's usually cheaper that way.

[dan_sapper]

Elite Chrome 100 is alive and well. It is the most modern of all Kodak slide films, along with Kodak Professional E100G and E100GX counterparts.

 

You should definitely let your store(s) know that you are interested in purchasing it. I agree that it would make more sense for most retailers to carry Elite Chrome 100 instead of the 400 speed.

 

If I was in charge of marketing at a retail chain or photo store, I'd make sure that Elite Chrome 100 and Extra Color 100 were always in stock. Elite Chrome 200 should also be well stocked; it can be pushed to 400 with better results than using Elite Chrome 400, in my opinion.

[steve_dunn2]

<cite>Elite Chrome 200 should also be well stocked; it can be pushed to 400 with better results than using Elite Chrome 400, in my opinion.</cite>

 

<p>Of course, most photo stores don't know what pushing is, and even if they do, most of them can't do it ...</p>

 

<p>(No, I'm not picking on Dan, whose opinions and knowledge I respect greatly.)</p>

[jsbc]

Has there been a change in Elite Chrome 100's formulation?

 

When I used it 2-3 years ago, it looks good, but there was disturbing magnetas in the shadows.

 

I am most happy with 100-G, but if the Elite Chrome has been changed, and it is much cheaper, I would not mind giving it a try.

[mkphoto]

So that's why I can't get EB in the local shops here, only EBX. I've been using exta colour for everything ISO100-- the skin tones aren't as bad as described actually. A bit orange but it's not at that fake-tan level of orange that you get with Velvia. It makes drunk people look definitely drunk though (redder than tomatoes!)

 

I guess I'll have to start looking into E100G or the like for my less contrasty, less saturated Kodak slide choice. I'm not a big fan of Sensia.

[andre_noble4]

Order short dated or recently expired bulk films from Freestyle, and freeze them. Shoot them. Don't worry. Be happy.

[ilkka_nissila]

It's good to know that it's alive. I think the vanilla Elite Chrome 100 is maybe the finest of all reversal films. I will go and pick some of it to my fridge tonight. I think it's a crime against humanity that some retailer might carry the 400 stuff and not the 100.

 

I think black and white negs have a clear advantage in image quality vs. 6 MP digital SLRs, and slide film gives punchy colours which are useful in many cases, but I don't really understand why color negative film should remain popular and slides not. I find that my D70 gives in pretty much all situations superior results to color neg, with the only exception being very high contrast subjects such as night scenes in the city. Reala might have some advantage in detail as well.

 

Ron, what applications are color negs purchased for? People photography?

[rowland_mowrey]

Ilkka;

 

Color negative film can be used for anything you use a slide film for. I really don't see what the problem is here with using a negative film. It has always outsold reversal films.

 

Ron Mowrey

[eric_rose3]

Hi all,

 

I got an email from Kodak Canada about a month ago. Elite Chrome 100 is not available in Canada at all. Too bad, the new emulsion is supposed to be very nice.

 

I am now starting to stock up on a few select types of film and freezing them, just in case.

[scott_eaton]

<I>I think it's a crime against humanity that some retailer might carry the 400 stuff and not the 100,</i><P>What's a 'crime' is that certain photographers have grown so fat and lazy they'll use the internet to complain about what amatuer films aren't sold at Target and Walmart, but not use the internet to order some E100G from B&H.<P>I'd also like to thank Dan for being patient on this, but again I'm tired of hearing about what films are/aren't available at K-mart and grocery stores. E100G is a great film, but 'EliteChrome' has a cooler name and the box it comes in has brighter colors, so who cares about the E100G junk. I also think we should have amatuer slide/print films available at fast food drive throughs. Save the calories and effort of actually walking into 7-11 and actually picking the film off the rack. Anybody checked to see what brand of frozen pizzas are on sale this week? Same place you bought your film.<P><I>Color negative film can be used for anything you use a slide film for</i><P>Yo, RainMan, we've been through this dance a few times before. If in your 30 years experience working with film/paper emulsions you haven't learned what the pictorial and technical differences are between slide and print, I'd advise buying a used HP Photosmart scanner and start learning.

[steve_dunn2]

<cite>Has there been a change in Elite Chrome 100's formulation?</cite>

 

<p>Yes. When E100G and E100GX replaced E100S and E100SW, EB was updated from being an E100S family member to an E100G family member.</p>

[rowland_mowrey]

Yo Scott;

 

If you knew anything about color negative you wouldn't make statements like that!

 

Maybe that is why EK didn't give you a good enough offer, as you said in your other post. You didn't know as much as you thought you did. The interviewers picked up on that.

 

Ron Mowrey

[ilkka_nissila]

Ron,

 

I appreciate your insight but I cannot agree with you on this. The looks of the prints from slide and negative films are completely different. When I scan color negatives, I have to run in through NeatImage (which takes something like 10 minutes just the processing) to get a file which gives good prints (even with iso 100 film I get too much grain in the prints if I don't filter it). Also, because all the labs which I've managed to found to make good 4x6 prints tend to scratch the film more often than not, and the 4000 dpi scanner picks it up very well, I have to spend quite some time cleaning it up.

 

With slides, I get a scan and make some local contrast adjustments and maybe a slight sharpening, and I'm ready to print. I do have to take out a few dust spots but it's nothing like cleaning up scratches in negs. With digital, I just do a levels adjustment and print. With digital and slides, my originals are very easy to find, but with negatives, there is a lot of searching to do because one has to look at a negative really carefully to find the correct one. These are the practical differences in my workflow.

 

The prints from all three routes look very different. They have different colours and overall appearance. Slides can give a kick to the image while in many subjects, negatives give a "blah" image. Royal Supra, which is supposed to give bright colours, gives a very strange sky color which is sort of washed out. My D70 gives accurate skys, while slide film can give a very saturated blue sky. Which is best? I do agree that there are some applications where negatives are great: night photography with city lights, and people photography with flash. In these cases, no other than C-41 film seems to give satisfactory results to my taste. However, I wouldn't dream about using negative film for nature photography - it just doesn't work.

 

In all, I've shot maybe 25-30 rolls of slide film since I got my D70, 3 rolls of color negative and 30 rolls of black and white film. I don't miss the negatives at all - I'll just use them to do the rare wedding or when I shoot night scenes. The post-processing is just too tedious and I don't seem to get an advantage in print quality over slides or let alone D70, which gives the best overall results of them all.

 

I do agree that fine results can be obtained shooting medium format color negative film, and when printing in a conventional darkroom, but I have access to neither. For 35 mm, I'm just put off by the grain which my scanner picks up. For some reason, the same grain doesn't appear on scans of iso 100 slides like the very nice Elite 100 of this thread.

 

No matter what technical advantages a film designer might find in color negative film, I just don't see them in the end results - the prints. But apparently they are popular - I suspect among those who print max 4x magnification and don't ever get to see the grain.

[bill_tuthill]

You have an LS-4000, right Ilkka? On my friend's Minolta 5400, I thought hi-res scans from 400UC were more detailed and less grainy

in the shadows than scans from EliteChrome 100. On my HP S10 scanner

EliteChrome looks awful: worse than Inferia 100 and almost as bad as

Konica VX.

[rowland_mowrey]

Bill, Ilkka;

 

I participated in the EK trade trial of scanning color negatives over 10 years ago. I found then that the scans were brillant and were equal or superior to any transparency that I had scanned.

 

Talking to experts in the field, they seem to all agree that the problem is that most scanners don't have the software capability to do a good job with negatives. The software developers have a slide to go by and can project the slide and tweak the software to match the scan to the slide, but they can't do the same for a negative.

 

EK and Fuji both have scanned negatives for over 20 years and have developed specific algorithms for negative scans that perfect the results. I have seen those results.

 

To add to this, there are scanning routines used in the motion picture industry to take color negative camera originals, scan them in and blend with the SFX, and then spit them out onto print or intermediate films to produce the projection prints we see in the theater.

 

So, yes, I have trouble scanning negatives myself, but when I let EK experts do it for me and give me a photo CD, the results are outstaning.

 

You can do this yourself, I have been told, by tweaking the curves and the masking in photo shop. The data, I'm told, is there but is not converted correctly from a straight line into the 's' shaped curve needed in a reproduction to truly represent the correct tonal range and color gamut.

 

The negative curve, when converted into a positive for viewing should have an Ektachrome or similar characteristic curve with a d-max of over 3.0 and a contrast of about 1.7 in the mid scale. In fact, superior results can be obtained if you follow the d-max example of neg-pos print films in general and raise the d-max to over 4.0. This extends the latitude of the final result by about 20% and will make the neg-pos result superior to a positive image.

 

Ron Mowrey

[ilkka_nissila]

Yes, I have an LS-4000 and in the advent of the D2X I can't justify buying a newer scanner. The LS-5000 is supposed to have software better suited for negatives but it's just too much money for me. I use usually Vuescan to scan negs and Nikon's own software for slides.

 

So Ron, basically you're saying that I could fix the problem in Photoshop if I knew exactly what I was doing. Darn, I'd so much like to keep the science out of my photography - after all, it's a hobby, supposed to give an escape from the science. :-)

 

I will play with curves and see what happens. Is there any literature on this?

[rowland_mowrey]

Ilkka;

 

The best I can suggest is this. Scan a transparency and get the absolute best you can from it. Observe the tone scale that photoshop has used for it.

 

Scan your negative and then try to fit that negative into the same tone scale, but also use a d-max of about 4 rather than the 3 that you get with a regular transparency. You should get about one more stop latitude in the shadows if you match the highlights.

 

That is a good starting point. I wish I knew more to help you, but I'm not into digital enough to do more than this. Sorry.

 

Ron Mowrey

[anand_n._vishwamitran]

Interesting to note that EC100 is now part of the E100G family. Does the same hold true for EliteChrome ExtraColor?

[bill_tuthill]

No Anand. I can't find the thread where quoted, but Kodak customer

support says EliteChrome Extra Color 100 hasn't been updated since

1999(?), whereas regular EliteChrome 100 was updated early this year.