"John Rumm" wrote in message
o.uk...
On 23/08/2020 15:34, Andrew wrote:
Just been looking through some boxes of other peoples
old slides that I bought a few years ago in house
clearance shops.

One box has a mix of slides marked 'made in england'
with no obvious date. I thought Kodak always stamped
or printed the processing date ?. Does anyone know
when this became common practice ?.

I have lots of cardboard mounted kodachrome from the late 60's early 70's
that my FiL took. Stamped mode in england, but none dated IIRC.

Not sure if that tell you much?

I've checked my dad's slides. Unfortunately all the ones of their wedding
and their honeymoon in 1962 are in plastic mounts with glass covering both
sides of the film, or else are in Agfa mounts which have always been
undated.

At a quick check (without pulling out *all* the reels of slides) the
earliest dated Kodachrome slides are 1969 and all the ones after that are
dated. I'm not sure that Agfa and Fuji dated their slides. I think Agfa may
have used dark blue / white plastic mounts rather than cardboard ones, which
don't lend themselves to being stamped with a date.

In the same box are some Kodachrome slides marked
'made in usa' and these do have a printed date - Aug 61.

all mine are UK...

The colours are as good as original, by holding them up
to daylight.

The earliest slides I can find are some that my mum took in the late 50s or
very early 60s, on a camera that uses film whose frame is fractionally
larger than 35 mm. It still uses the same size mount - only the cut-out for
the film is a different size.


Yup same here - I did scan them some years back. Kodachrome tend to scan
with a slightly blue cast.

My scanner can correct for dirt on the film by shining infra-red through: it
is not absorbed by the emulsion but it is by dirt/dust. That allows dirt to
be identified separate from the image, so interpolation can fill in what
would have been there. Except that Kodachrome emulsion *does* differentially
absorb IR (ie it varies in different parts of the picture), so the results
for dirt removal are not as good as with Agfa, Fuji or Kodak Ektachrome.

I've not had problems with Kodachrome giving blue scans, though it is a
little bit more cold and "clinical" than the other films I've mentioned.

For some reason, Kodachrome emulsion looks a lot coarser in grain when I
scan the slide than it does in real life: not much better that Ektachrome
200. And the "grain removal" algorithm on my scanner seems to produce better
results with Ektachrome 200 or 400 than the results with/without grain
removal on Kodachrome - weird.