If you really wanna try this I wish you the best of luck.The only emulsion type that seems to missing today are old style thick emulsion Films (Kodak Super Sensitive Panachromatic, Verichrome, etc... love drool) Id love to have one of those and they seem to be easier to make than newer emulsion types they are grainier though.
Dominik
At the risk of beating a dead horse I am going to make one last response to this thread regarding the last At the risk of beating a dead horse I am going to make one last response to this thread regarding the last three.
Dan, Experimentation is the starting point. Whether it goes beyond that is dependent on how well the experimentation goes. I do understand how to run a successful business as well. I have started several successful companies already and all goes well I have investors ready to fund it. The secret is, I have their trust that if they give me money I will make them a nice profit. I don't want to ever lose that trust, so unless I am 100% certain I will profit I will not take their money. To that point, this is why it will start as recreation, then if feasible move into more and also the reason I asked the question.
Jay, firstly because I don't believe film is dead. Secondly, film has the potential to do far more technologically than we have ever dreamed of. I don't want to let anything out, but we haven't even come close to maxing out the technical possibilities of film.
Lastly, Ben, thank you!
I want to thank all of you for your responses my questions, even the nay-sayers. Every comment is important information. In that spirit, add more if you would like. It will only help.
Actually those old school emulsions were said to be as much art as science, and once the tricky details ceased to be carefully handed down from one generation to
another, it became almost impossible to replicate something like Super-XX. Even the
batching equipment had to be just exactly right. More like making a fine wine - you
need a lot more background than just a recipe or textbook. There are some circumstances when the elves and gnomes and sorcerers just have to be around!
Verichrome was a great film. My first ever roll of film I developed, when I was about 10-11 years old, was Verichrome. I bought a roll of 127 for my mom's Brownie and developed it in the bathroom, using a darkroom kit I got, I think, from Edmund Scientific. It included a little fixed size plastic enlarger for making 4x5 or so prints and a pack of 4x5 single weight fiber paper. I printed some of the roll too. My parents had no clue about this stuff and just sort of scratched their head about their son, but were supportive. This would have been 1973-74 or so.
But Verichrome was a great, forgiving film.
Bizarre.
Jeff - none of my personal comments are intended as discouragment. But at this point there already a number of people working on new emulsions and piles of patents in the background, with very few ever coming into actual mfg. You need to
find some much more specific goal than just some new taking film, and also need to
get an idea of what or what has not already transpired in that direction. Maybe think
outside the box entirely and look at the whole picture of sustainable analog printing
before choosing a target. And then get ahold of a few likeminded experimenters
with solid experience before they pass away. And the big boys do hold a lot of patents that have never come to the fore, so you could do some really bright thinking and inadvertently come to a complete dead end regarding marketing.
Before heading into the lab for a few odds n' ends tonite, I can give some analogous
history. I used to tangle with the coatings industry quite a bit (not photographic). I'd
get into the labs of say an acrylic chemist of even a mid-sized mfg, and they'd have
hundreds and hundreds of samples of different emulsions on hand. Maybe only 1%
of them would ever find a market application. But their job was to come up with more and more, just in case the right application came around. The R&D apparatus
of some big company like Kodak can really be astounding. But as a fun introduction
to this game, why not come over to the Dye Transfer forum, and if you can survive
a few of the contentious personalities, help with the commercial revival of matrice
film etc. Or if not, that would be a good place to review the practical complications
involved in any kind of "relatively" simple emulsion coating project.
Jeff,Originally Posted by dexmeister
I never said film is dead, I said it's a mature technology, ie, any improvements made are likely to be incremental, very expensive, and made by leading manufacturers rather than home experimenters. I think the chances that some startup could make a film anything like as good as TMY-2 are zero, never mind color films. If we're talking about the film market, if it's not dead, it's certainly dying.
On the other hand.... as a technology emerges, the field is wide open for innovators and experimenters, even those working in makeshift facilities on small budgets. That's the crucial distinction I was trying to make. Still, I always cheer for the underdog, and I wish you all success!
Dying like sales of oil paints or the Amercan Steel making industry? Realistically there will always be companies wether USA based or not, that supply what people want. Nervous hand wringing aside, one can create ones own film plates rather simplistically in terms of chemical process and knowledge. With any media you have edge pusher folks that like to make thier own systems the Leonardo D's of the world, the painters per say that buy the materials and grind thier own pigment versus the out of box kits folks prefer less complex prefabed creativity that performs to fairly consistent specs.
Me: I like the edge, but consistent work too
"Great things are accomplished by talented people who believe they will
accomplish them."
Warren G. Bennis
www.gbphotoworks.com
No, definitely not dying like artist's oils, the demand for which has increased steadily since their introduction, though at modest sales levels, and definitely not dying like steel, the demand for which and volume of production of which is greater than ever, but dying as in demand declining precipitously toward zero as the result of competition with an alternative technology. That kind of dying.
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