"Andrew" wrote in message
...
On 10/06/2021 15:17, Tim Streater wrote:
On 10 Jun 2021 at 13:27:54 BST, The Natural Philosopher

wrote:

Kodachrome however, especially 25, was a beautiful - and extremely
expensive - film

Agree it was beautiful, wouldn't agree it was particularly expensive. I
never
used anything else and regret its passing.


It was the same price as Kodachrome 64 and Kodachrome 200 in 35mm format
from what I remember.

Kodachrome 200? That must have been after I stopped using film and went over
to digital. The fastest I can remember is Kodachrome 64 - and that was
pretty slow for interior shots. What speed was Kodachrome Super 8 cine film?
I think it might have been 16, to get the finest grain possible - hence the
need for powerful photoflood lights indoors ;-)

I found that Kodachrome was good for fidelity of colours, but was rather
contrasty: you lost a bit of highlight and shadow detail, and the shadows
were ever so slightly greenish. Ektachrome was better for this and was of
course a lot faster (160 [tungsten], 200 or 400), but it had a slightly
colder colour balance. I once push-processed Ektachrome 160 to 640 ASA
(underexpose by two stops, get the lab to overdevelop by two stops) for some
photos I was taking of my sister taking part in a gymnastics contest indoors
under stage lighting. The results were not pretty: very contrasty and
over-saturated colours. Nowadays I could use a digital camera at 3200 ASA in
any colour of "white" light ranging from tungsten bulbs (2400K) up to
outdoor shade (about 10000K) and get equally good results. You have to look
pretty hard to distinguish 100 ASA from 3200 ASA with my DSLR.


One thing I discovered when I came to scan my dad's slides and mine with a
scanner that uses IR to detect dust and correct for it, is that this does
not work with Kodachrome: there is something in the emulsion which
attenuates IR to a variable extent depending on slide density, whereas I
presume IR dust correction assumes that film of any visible density
attenuates IR equally. This means that Kodachrome slides scanned with
dust-removal turned on have a strange tonal quality and slight blurring
which varies with brightness - yuk! That was certainly the case for my
Minolta film scanner and AFAIK is the case with all scanners which use IR to
detect dust. Ektachrome, AgfaChrome and OEM films (eg Boots' slide film),
and all colour negative films, work fine with dust-removal turned on.
However I never cracked the problem of how to get faithful-looking scans of
colour negs: the colours always looked a bit "artificial" and OTT, rather
like the illustration on colour "plates" in a book from the 1930s-50s.