Kodachrome.

[captyng@vtx.ch (Gerard Captijn)]

Last night I saw an old (1938) Warner movie: Robin Hood by Michael Curtiz
with Erroll Flynn and Olivia de Havilland. The movie was shot 60 years ago
in Technicolor and the colors were still  p e r f e c t.  Reds and blues
well saturated (King Lionhart and Robin Hoods costumes), the greens
(Sherwood forest) excellent and even the difficult skintones were very good.
Many films made 30 - 40 years later, including many series made for
television (Rick Hunter, Cousteau's movies, etc.), lost an important part of
their color content: desaturated colors, color casts, poor contrast, stained
highlights, transparent shadows, etc.

The difference between Technicolor and later color systems is that with
Technicolor the dyes are introduced in the film when development is finished
while in the other processes color is formed during (color)development via a
reaction between development fall-out products and coupling agents present
in each of the layers of the film. The Technicolor people have many
colorants to choose from (often very stable); color-coupler film
manufacturers can use only a limited selection of coupling products (often
not stable at all). Technicolor has good archival qualities, more recent
materials have not.

Kodachrome works like Technicolor, E6 films use color couplers, like recent
movie materials. Although the best E6 materials (Ektachrome, Velvia) have
now color saturation and grain that is somewhat better than Kodachrome,
sharpness and color permanence of Kodachrome is such that, in my opinion, it
is still the best film for slides, if you don't project too often. I hope
that Kodak will continue to manufacture and develop Kodachrome for a long
time (at least until new digital media can record 20 million pixels on
24X36mm at reasonable cost).

I want my slides to be permanent like Technicolor, not like more recent
color print material. An added benefit is that the combination of Leica
lens- and Kodachrome image quality somehow is magic.
Gerard Captijn,
Geneva, Switzerland.
Email: captyng@vtx.ch
Fax: +41 (22) 700 39 28







































































































































Gerard Captijn
Geneva, Switzerland
Email: captyng@vtx.ch
Telephone/fax: +41 22 700 39 28