Re: Kodachrome, Kodalux, Qualudes ...

["Charles E. Love, Jr." <cel14@cornell.edu>]

At 05:31 PM 12/4/96 -0500, you wrote:
>Gag me.  Why ANYONE who has respect for themselves, other than those in San
>Francisco, would use Fuji's garish colours escapes me completely.  (San
>Francisco, a lovely city in which I once lived, has lots of fog.  Fuji film
>does fine on grey, nasty, days where it seems almost normal.  On normal
>days, it yields prints best left in the gutter on 42nd Street.)

Well, if you are talking about Fuji print film (since you mention prints),
then there is no general across the board rule about their print film--they
make many different ones, with different characters.  If you are talking
about slide film, again you have to be specific.  But the slide films most
open to such an attack are, first, Velvia, and second, Provia.  Sorry to
tell you this, but those films completely dominate color landscape work
these days.  There's plenty of room for disagreement on this--it's of course
an aesthetic question--but I hardly think Ketchum, Neill, and a host of
other fine art photographers who use it lack self-respect; they are the
leaders in their field.  Of course, besides the aesthetic questions, there's
Kodak's neglect--Kodachrome has never been made for large format, and they
were very late in bringing it out for MF, and recently dropped it.  In their
arrogance, they continued to fob off too-blue Ectachrome for the larger
formats long after Fuji had surpassed it in every respect (the old
Fujichrome 50 was a better film, by far, than Ectachrome 64, though a bit
green for my taste).
>
>In any event, Kodak was forced to divest themselves of their processing arm
>as a settlement on an ANTI-TRUST action:  at the time, they owned too much
>of the film, paper, processing, and chemical business to make our fascist
>regulators happy, so it went out to a private company.  Years later, a
>different regime of fascist regulators determined it would be okay for Kodak
>to control Kodachrome processing, so they bought it back.
>
Not true.  You're confused about this.  Many, many years ago Kodak was
forced to drop the requirement that those who bought Kodachrome bought Kodak
processing by having it included in the price--and that surely was a
legitimate target for regualtion, since it prevented anyone from competing
with Kodak processing.  This decision had a very positive effect; labs to
compete with K sprung up.  That's what you're thinking of.  

The more recent decision to turn Kodak processing into Kodalux was made by
Kodak, free of regulators, for economic reasons--and perhaps (I sometimes
think this, in paranoid moments) to give them an excuse to get rid of
Kodachrome altogether by giving over the official processing to a lousy
private company.  Kodak did retain some control--they had people who were
supposed to oversee processing who worked for Kodak--but they couldn't make
it work.  I don't know how to read their decision to take it back, but it
had nothing to do with changes in government regulation.  

>Spare me.  Kodak does okay, now, with Kodachrome processing.  Love the stuff
>-- as an earlier poster properly noted, 'Kodachrome and Leica belong together'.
>
Perhaps--but Kodachrome could have belonged to MF and LF too, and, for many
years, surely would have been the top film in those formats, since it was so
obviously better than the E6 films of, say, 20 years ago.  But K, in its
arrogance, refused to do it, and here we are.
Charles E. Love, Jr.
CEL14@CORNELL.EDU