ugh... someone posted nearly this exact same question on APUG.
look, I cans till go buy 127 film brand new from stores with retail locations.
formats that are actually commonly used are in no danger.
ugh... someone posted nearly this exact same question on APUG.
look, I cans till go buy 127 film brand new from stores with retail locations.
formats that are actually commonly used are in no danger.
Drew, I didn't "badmouth" film. I simply referenced the cost of 35mm Kodachrome, adjusted for inflation. That would be 185 rolls of 35mm to equal a Pentax 645D body. (Yes, Kirk, that includes Kodak's monopoly priced developing. After developing was seperated from the film, the price dropped in half. Still not cheap. $27 per roll? Not for me.) I'm just making the point that the price of film can still go up, and its original introduction price was steep.Originally Posted by Drew Wiley
Bostick & Sullivan 8x10 wet plate collodion kit yields at least 35 plates, which is cheaper than color film, at $7.71 per plate.
But the question still remains: at what point do you give up film because it's too expensive? Yes, film can be purchased. And is $500 per 10 pack of 8x10 color a reasonable price for you?
Yes, a home coating machine can be made. But is the appropriate polyester base material available? At all? When you have to buy at least four miles of base as a minimum order? Kodak sells miles of film, so, hey, no problem there. But for the average guy like me, or the non-average guy like you, that's an extreme problem. That's just the way it is with film. Do you really think that we'd also be producing our own cellulose nitrate or acetate film base? I wouldn't be certain about that.
I hope that various hospitals and clinics keep using enough sheet film to offset the cost of my film. (Last time I was in the dentist lab, they were using film.)
The company I work for screen prints conductive inks onto polyester to make flexible circuits. We have enough offcuts to keep me busy if I ever wanted to try to make my own film.
0.125mm thick polyester is fairly easy to get hold of and if enough people were interested, they could combine their money and have a roll split up into several narrower rolls for home use.
Some of these polyesters have a coating to make them more receptive to ink adhesion and I think this would also work in the emulsion's favour.
Steve.
This notion of home coating is nuts. There are some who will coat their own plates for a specific old-fashioned black-and-white look. But there are very few who will do that just because they want to make photographs.
And forget color.
We are absolutely dependent on the color film industry. We should not pretend otherwise. If people spend effort brewing color media at home, they will be brewing up ways to capture images digitally. I hope it doesn't happen for a long, long time. There is also likely a limit to how little color film can be made at a price the market will bear. I'd love it if Polaroid Type 55 were still available, but I cannot and will not pay the prices being asked for out-of-date boxes of the stuff. We all have our limits. If the cost of producing color reaches a point where it cannot sustain that price point, it will cease to be made. None of us really knows what that point is, or at what production level. But there are many things one used to be able to buy that are no longer available, and people just have to live with it.
The real problem is not this or that about film. The real problem is that too few value the type of image-making that is possible only with large format. Thus, there is no market effort to produce large-format digital solutions. We need a period like back in the 60's, when Calumet was selling view cameras hand over fist to amateurs, because that was a way for an amateur to achieve really high image quality modestly. As long as the definition of "really high image quality" can be attained by current small-format offerings, there will be no market drive to produce a large-format alternative.
Thus, it's not the film we should be advocating. It's the supreme image quality. I haven't a clue what might make that advocacy effective in the general market.
Rick "for whom the problem is too little commitment by the public to the image aesthetic that requires large format" Denney
Possibly but there are plenty of nutty people around who like to do nutty things. Some more nutty than coating their own film!
Steve.
That is the most trivial part to it - "FILM" as a generic object is a rampant technology in biosciences and electronics, to the degree that photographic film production sites usually end up being sold off for conversion to some non-photographic process (see the fate of Polaroid). Accordingly, polyester and acetate bases are cheap and easy to get hold of.
Photo grade non-fogging gelatin (fifty years ago it needed a special diet for the cattle, and even now it will at the very least need very special processing and additives), sensitizers, stabilizers and dyes are more likely to raise in price, as many of them have no bulk use outside film photography.
Agreed. And what's more - colour, that odd old tri-chrome thing, shares most of its many inherent limitations with current digital colour processes. Sooner or later somebody will market a superior process - and he probably will use digital for that...
Of course. But fringe nuts do not a sustainable market make.
And doing consistent, high-quality color might challenge the technology available to nuts, however nutty.
Not everyone wants that hand-made look.
Rick "nuttier than most" Denney
But home coating does not need a sustainable market. Each nut making enough film for his* own needs. (* not her as woman are too intelligent to even bother!).
Steve.
Please outline for me what it would take to coat color emulsions at home.
Rick "who was NOT talking about black and white" Denney
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