Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2002/11/04
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]- --On Monday, November 4, 2002 10:17 AM -0500 Dante Stella <dante@umich.edu> wrote: > > Rolfe, let's put it this way. > > Kodak led the charge up the B&W hill with the T-grain films and the > ascorbic-acid developers, easily outspending Fuji, Agfa and Ilford in the > process. > > Black and white technology is completely mature; in terms of > ultimate usable resolution, we have been at a plateau since the 1950s, > when someone discovered that document films have the highest resolution. > In fact, the current alleged "gigibit" films are nothing more than > document films. > > Furthermore, the huge price of whatever incremental improvement remains to > be made cannot be economically justified when B&W is only around 5% of the > total market. Kodak has by no means been hostile to the black and white > market - they just built a new film plant for it -- and kept Verichrome > Pan in production long after Agfa quit with APX 25. Dante, I agree with all of this. I guess the intended irony of my original remark didn't translate to the written word. I was merely observing how ironic it is that Kodak is spending all this money on a new B&W plant when all the company's B&W experts, including the inventors of Xtol, etc., have long since departed Rochester. Given that, it seems unlikely that new B&W developments will come from Kodak. Now, it may be that we really have everything we need and that B&W technology is, as you put it, completely mature. But I would note that both Fuji and Ilford continue to introduce new B&W emulsions regularly. > Leica, on the other hand, has not spent any significant money on M line > bodies, the newest of which is 30 years behind technologically. Leica has > not been an innovator for about fifty years in rangefinder bodies, and it > is nowhere near the limits of what can be done within market constraints. Well, Seth is the one who added the Leica observation so I'll just leave this one alone :-)l Rolfe - -- Rolfe Tessem rolfe@ldp.com Lucky Duck Productions, Inc. - -- To unsubscribe, see http://mejac.palo-alto.ca.us/leica-users/unsub.html