The mighty Kodak also made the Elite Chrome range aimed at consumers alongside the pro-spec Ektachrome films. Like Precisa, these films were more wallet friendly than their professional grade brothers. And if there’s one thing that LOMOgraphers liked, it was cheaper film. After running several different reversal films in E-6 chemistry lately, I have a particular appreciation for Ektachrome’s behavior after drying. I’ve found that it’s relatively flat when dry, with no longitudinal curl whatsoever for me. Laterally, there’s a very slight curl, but the strips of film load and sits quite well in my Epson V800 scanner’s film holders. Contrast that to Fuji’s Provia, which has a dramatic lateral curl toward the emulsion side, making scanning a painful chore; the film has to be taped down to even stay in the film holder. I can say this with confidence: I’ll never buy Provia again for that reason alone. In short, I love how cooperative Ektachrome is to my workflow.

A. EKTACHROME is a colour reversal film. You get a positive image that can be viewed or projected immediately after processing. All the other KODAK PROFESSIONAL Films available today are negative-working films. To view an image, these films must be exposed, processed, and then either scanned and/or printed.

Incident experiments

This brings me up to the couple of rolls I shot on holiday in Wales. Actually, as I say in my post about my Pentax Espio 80, by the time I went on holiday, I was feeling a little down about photography and just wanted to point & shoot. As such, I resolved that I wasn’t going to think about metering with an incident meter, and that I’d just snap and see what I got. As it turned out, the meter in the Pentax Espio 80 is very good.

At the risk of making this a very short review, I’ll come right out and say that I completely agree with what they say. Kodak E100VS has super fine grain, great sharpness, rich colors and produces really vivid slides. To see what each film could do I tried to shoot Kodak Ektachrome E100 and Fuji Provia 100F in a variety of lighting conditions. E6 slide film is known to have limited latitude compared to colour negative films. As such it is more common to shoot slide film in subdued light where there is less contrast. Personally I love hard light such as direct sunlight so I put the films to the test. Spoiler alertAs it turned out, Kodak had some difficulty in meeting demand at first, according to at least three retailers I spoke with in early 2020. Indeed, it wasn’t until mid-February 2020 that I finally got my boxes of the 120 film. And regrettably, it was longer still before I had a chance to shoot enough of it to justify breaking-out one of the E-6 processing kits that I’d long ago acquired in anticipation. How will new EKTACHROME compare with the original? Well, images I have seen from film sent out for Beta testing certainly have that EKTACHROME look. You’ve seen already the three best-exposed shots I got from this roll. The first one below is okay too, but then they’ll get progressively worse to show you how things can change when shooting slide film in just slightly different or sub-optimal light. Keep in mind that the results from slide films these days may vary both based on who’s developing them and based on how they’re scanned (or viewed). A slight difference in the developing procedure may change the characteristics of the film. A slight difference in scanning setup and parameters (or in the light used for viewing a slide) may change how the film looks after developing and scanning/viewing.

Some of the shots below are lab processed, while others were done in my own darkroom. In both cases, they were scanned on my Epson V800, using only the scanner’s native auto-exposure settings. No color adjustments or other enhancements were applied, either during or after scanning. My first time shooting and self-processing Ektachrome was a whopping four decades ago. Things have changed since my days trying to temper a water bath for the chemistry in the family bath tub; these days, I use an immersion circulator — sometime erroneously referred to as a “sous vide machine” — to temper the water bath in which my color chemistry sits while processing rolls. The magnitude of Kodak successfully rereleasing a film like Ektachrome is huge. It’s also a milestone that, frankly, many of us never thought possible. When the staff here at CP first heard whispers of an Ektachrome revival, we were happy, but skeptical. We’d been through this before with other film projects. Big promises on social media to #keepfilmalive, the flashy promotional campaign, the buzzworded crowdfunding, and the whole load of nothing that happens afterwards. For more than a year we heard just a few intermittent reports that Ektachrome was still coming. But we were entirely ready to be disappointed again.If Velvia 50 is Walt Disney, Velvia 100 is Roy Disney – the less popular version of its celebrity sibling. I’ve seen Velvia 100 attract a lot of negative comments, usually labeling it inferior in comparison to Velvia 50, but I think this reputation is undeserved and there are situations where Velvia 100 is preferrable. Sure, the contrasty, punchy lens of the LOMO LC-A, with its moody vignetting and attention-grabbing sharpness, was a big part of it. Elite Chrome EBX: Properly called Kodak EliteChrome Ext

Marcell Rév adopts an EKTACHROME approach for 'Euphoria' in pursuit…". Kodak . Retrieved June 11, 2023.

1980

Not having to go through the development process and also having easily shareable digital files was something that couldn’t be ignored. Unfortunately, this meant that Ektachrome increasingly was. I’m really happy with the outcome, but I can’t help wondering if the NEF raw files from my Sony A7R3 will give me a bit more room for manoeuvre and/or give me better control. Next steps In contrast, with the exception of the very last Kodachrome K-labs, the processing machines for Kodachrome were very large and processed large reels of film made up of many customers' rolls spliced together on to one large roll. The processing machine I am familiar with was the size of a city bus (and much louder) and the reels of spliced film consisted of about one mile of leader, one mile of spliced film and then another mile of trailer. In busy times of the year, it was run almost continuously throughout a 24 hour day - reel, after reel, after reel.