[drewdlephone]

I didn't see this on the forum anywhere, so perhaps we all missed it? I know I wasn't paying attention until I saw this in the back of a Shutterbug magazine.

KODAK PROFESSIONAL EKTAR 100 Film

I want to try this stuff!

Kodak producing a NEW color film? Maybe all is not lost. This stuff looks pretty good too, if you like color. What surprises me is that Ilford and Kodak are both divesting themselves into creating newer, better film. So it seems that, while digital is clearly the mainstream market leader currently, the technology behind film is also becoming more advanced, and subsequently, giving the ever-changing digital realm something to reach for.

So much for film being archaic. If companies are coming out with entirely new film products, how long until we see a major company re-release a film SLR? I can dream, right?

[Gooshin]

here is my friends newly developed roll, scanned on a Nikon Coolscan 5000

Paul Kounine | 2008 Dec

[ftpaddict]

here is my friends newly developed roll, scanned on a Nikon Coolscan 5000

Paul Kounine | 2008 Dec

The colours look great. I can't wait for the Ektar to show up in Romania.

[vinzer]

I didn't see this on the forum anywhere, so perhaps we all missed it? I know I wasn't paying attention until I saw this in the back of a Shutterbug magazine.

KODAK PROFESSIONAL EKTAR 100 Film

I want to try this stuff!

Kodak producing a NEW color film? Maybe all is not lost. This stuff looks pretty good too, if you like color. What surprises me is that Ilford and Kodak are both divesting themselves into creating newer, better film. So it seems that, while digital is clearly the mainstream market leader currently, the technology behind film is also becoming more advanced, and subsequently, giving the ever-changing digital realm something to reach for.

So much for film being archaic. If companies are coming out with entirely new film products, how long until we see a major company re-release a film SLR? I can dream, right?

I think I may have seen that film a couple of months ago, though I might have been mistaken. In any case, it would be nice if major companies would re-release film SLRs, as these still have a place in today's photographic world, though I don't see that happening. Digital SLRs are easier to provide updates for, and hence lure people to buy new bodies on a regular basis. Just the fact that a Spotmatic from the 60's and a light meter is still good enough to take film photos today would probably give camera companies pause in re-releasing old bodies.

But hey, if they do release new film bodies, I'm all for it.

I think the resurgence of film via Lomography (yes, Ben's Holga ) helped partly in getting companies like Kodak, Ilford, and Fuji to keep producing film and show them that it is not a dead medium still.

I would like to see upstart companies cash in on the resurgence of film (well, okay, it's not a torrential resurgence, but still...) with clones, as Russian companies once did with Leicas. May I suggest the highly open K-mount and M42 mounts?

[JCSullivan]

I seem to remember an Koday Ektar in the 70s...

[Wheatfield]

One new film is NOT a resurgence, and there is no guarantee that the new Ektar 100 (there was an Ektar 100 in the mid 80s as well) isn't just a rebadge of something else.
Nikon's last F6 rolled off the assembly line some months ago, making the only SLR cameras being made now the Chinese knock-offs, and the only film compacts being the plastic toys.
Methinks a few people are trying to breath new life into a recent corpse. Film as a mainstream picture taking media is pretty much a dead issue, and it is only a matter of time (and I believe that time is not long) before the big boys get out of the sandbox and move on.

[71Matador250]

I was in Japan for a few weeks early last year and was amazed by the number of people using film. Most of the other than north american and some european tourists were shooting a 35mm film camera of some type. Film selection was incredible in stores also. While I completely agree that film has lost dominance as the media for recording an image, I believe it will be a long while before there is a lack of film. Special emulsions driven by pro users will die off because demand has died, but film for the masses will still exist. In most of the third world film is still the dominant media. As computer tech and cameras become more affordable digital dominance will spread.
As for the Kodak Ektar, I'm going to run a few rolls through my ME Super and Minolta 7S II and see what I think. The lens on the 7SII is one of the sharpest I have ever encountered because of the close distance to the film plane. I will post some results. It will be here in the next week or so. In reality I would suggest that the release of the Kodak Ektar film is a market test to check the demand for a new pro grade film. The emulsion was probably in development and marketing limbo for several years and Kodak wanted to re-coup some of their costs.
Happy New Year All!

[k100d]

the first discussion was here
https://www.pentaxforums.com/forums/pentax-film-slr-discussion/36666-new-kodak-sensor.html

One new film is NOT a resurgence, and there is no guarantee that the new Ektar 100 (there was an Ektar 100 in the mid 80s as well) isn't just a rebadge of something else.

it's definitely not something else that they already had and simply "rebadged", origins seem unclear.

here is my friends newly developed roll, scanned on a Nikon Coolscan 5000

Paul Kounine | 2008 Dec

do some of the colors here look kind of pastel to you? because from other samples i've seen, it looks kinda of similar

Kodak Ektar 100 - Rangefinderforum.com
Kodak Ektar 100 .... I think I'm in love again! - APUG

[gofour3]

Great news about the new Kodak film, I will also try it.

As for film going away, sorry no chance of that happening. Vinyl was supposed to disappear in the 1980’s when CD’s came out, but guess what it didn’t.

There are lots of things you can do with a manual film camera that you can’t do with a digital camera. What’s going to happen is that some digital users will revert back to film when they see the light and both will coexist just like vinyl and CD’s.

[drewdlephone]

One new film is NOT a resurgence, and there is no guarantee that the new Ektar 100 (there was an Ektar 100 in the mid 80s as well) isn't just a rebadge of something else.
Nikon's last F6 rolled off the assembly line some months ago, making the only SLR cameras being made now the Chinese knock-offs, and the only film compacts being the plastic toys.
Methinks a few people are trying to breath new life into a recent corpse. Film as a mainstream picture taking media is pretty much a dead issue, and it is only a matter of time (and I believe that time is not long) before the big boys get out of the sandbox and move on.

The only reason I don't believe that is Kodak Disc Cameras. There's a product that failed miserably, was only produced for four years, and had terrible prints using the existing minilab equipment of the time. So when did Kodak stop making Disc film? 1999.

35mm is no longer mainstream, but I think there are markets (obviously Japan apparently) and others where it will continue to thrive, albeit on a smaller basis. According to our sales in the last year, we're actually up 47% in terms of film sales from 2007, and about that for processing too. Now, 47% of what number I can't say, because I don't know, but I still think that's impressive. Film sales have likely leveled off from their long plummet, hence we see new developments like Ektar 100, which Kodak is likely making in small amounts to satisfy the size of the market for said film. I don't see 35mm dying off for a long time. Instant cameras are still mightily popular, and they use 35mm. You'll still be able to buy it. I suspect, slowly, companies will pull their minilab equipment out of service, leaving film a send-to-an-outlab thing, as there just won't be the traffic to justify the chemistry costs. Or they could do what my company has done, which is switch a lot of labs over to a small processor like the Noritsu T15, which will only do one roll (and takes 8 minutes to do it) at a time, but is able to store chemistry in smaller amounts and for longer periods, minimizing the cost of keeping the film processor in-store.

One of the main reasons for this continued interest is technicalities that I discuss with our lab techs for hours on end. None of them seems to think that digital has yet reached the color depth or definition of fine-grain film. DSLRs with the right glass come close and even surpass the faster films in terms of overall sharpness, but even with 12 bit RAW files, that's only a third of what the supposed maximum depth color film provides. For film users, what you need to watch nowadays is the fact that all printing labs pretty much are digital devices, so your analog film is being turned into digital pictures before it's printed, and scanners aren't always used at their highest setting because the digital printing systems are only capable of 300dpi. So if you put film and digital into a modern lab, get them back in an hour, and aside from the colors can't see much of a difference, that's not because digital has caught up. It's because film is being neutered in the lab.

Hard to say where we're headed, really. Film as a niche market could fly, especially if companies re-introduce film SLRs and compacts in small amounts. In the compact market, that very well might be the only thing left to sell in five years, as cellphone cameras eat the low-end P&S market and Big-Zooms and falling SLR prices eat the top end. Film is certainly not something you can haul around in your cell phone.

[noblepa]

One new film is NOT a resurgence, and there is no guarantee that the new Ektar 100 (there was an Ektar 100 in the mid 80s as well) isn't just a rebadge of something else.
Nikon's last F6 rolled off the assembly line some months ago, making the only SLR cameras being made now the Chinese knock-offs, and the only film compacts being the plastic toys.
Methinks a few people are trying to breath new life into a recent corpse. Film as a mainstream picture taking media is pretty much a dead issue, and it is only a matter of time (and I believe that time is not long) before the big boys get out of the sandbox and move on.

I don't know if they're still building them or just selling off old stock, but Canon USA still shows the EOS 1v 35mm SLR on their website.

Canon EOS 1v 35mm SLR

Nikon USA still shows the F6 and FM10 on their website. Again, they may simply be selling off existing stock.

But, in general, I agree with your point. No one is investing in building film SLR cameras and no one is likely to introduce a new one. Our only source for quality film cameras is the used market.

Finding a decent lab to process film is becoming more difficult every day, as well. Recent purchasers of film cameras will probably not use them as long as they might have, as they find that they have to buy film on the internet or by mail, and must send the film to another city for processing. When those people give up, they will have no choice but to buy a digital camera.

Even today, when I can still have my film processed locally, the prints are made by scanning the negatives and printing digitally, at about 6MP scans. I know of no one locally who still does optical enlargements. I think that this mediocre scanning has fed the erroneous claim by some digital enthusiasts that 35mm cameras can not produce a decent 8 x 10, let alone anything larger. If the scan is only 6MP, much of the detail on a good 35mm negative will be lost.

[stevebrot]

I recently bought several rolls of Ektar 100 and am taking the first roll in for processing today. I will post the results if they are any good

Edit:
Examples from first roll posted here:

https://www.pentaxforums.com/forums/pentax-film-slr-discussion/45448-kodak-ek...tml#post435014

Steve

[Wheatfield]

Great news about the new Kodak film, I will also try it.

As for film going away, sorry no chance of that happening. Vinyl was supposed to disappear in the 1980’s when CD’s came out, but guess what it didn’t.

There are lots of things you can do with a manual film camera that you can’t do with a digital camera. What’s going to happen is that some digital users will revert back to film when they see the light and both will coexist just like vinyl and CD’s.

Well, the only place I can buy records where I live is a couple of used record stores. I can't buy em new here, and this is the way it is most places.
This isn't coexistence.
This is not to say that I am buying into your argument, just debating what you are saying.
The major difference between film for photographers and vinyl records for audio enthusiasts is that a person can practically press records in their basement. The manufacture is very low technology.
Vinyl is now a rump product with a few enthusiastic users, enough to perhaps support some low tech manufacturing.
Colour film, on the other hand, is not a low tech manufacturing process. At some point, the demand for colour film will dry up to the point that it isn't viable to make it anymore.
We've already seen the start of it. Agfa is gone, as is Konica. Kodak has outsourced pretty much all their manufacturing to China, and has dropped more emulsions than they have replaced over the last few years. I'm not sure about what Fuji is doing, but as has been pointed out, Japan is still a very large niche market for film.
Quixotically, it is also the market where Pentax does the best, IIRC.
Walk into any camera store in North America and look at what is available for film compared to a decade ago. There will be some there, but look closely.
Where I am, 120 film is barely available off the shelf, 220 is special order, and I have to buy a minimum amount, and possibly wait for a while until the shop has built up enough demand to place an order.
4x5 is available, but in much the same way as 220. I might be able to buy a box of sheet film today, I might not.
I spent almost a decade working in a photo lab for a company called Wal-Mart (hey, you gotta do something). When I started with them in 1997, the film rack at the store I was at was something like 24 feet long, with film in dump bins.
I was at that same store the other day, and noticed that their film rack (it's now a 4 foot pegboard) has a couple of different emulsions, and is sharing space with single use cameras.
When I stopped working for that company in 2006, film processing had taken 50% volume hits 2 years running. We went from considering a busy day at 700 rolls to a busy day at well under 200 rolls.
What did stay relatively stable over this time was single use camera processing, which went from under 5% of our processing volume in ~2000 to almost 60% of our volume in 2005.
The tech who I chatted with says they never once topped 100 rolls of film all summer this year, almost entirely from single use cameras.
The pro shop I buy from is telling me much the same thing. They aren't selling it and people aren't processing it.
Kodak is closing all their Qualex labs within the next few months, which pretty much is the wholesale film processing industry in North America closing it's doors.
What I see happening over the next few years is that the volumes will drop to the point that labs are no longer going to see their film processing machines as viable equipment and will start to retire them.

As that happens, people will be forced into other photographic media, be it digital or self processed B&W, which, incidentally, I do think has a fairly stable future.
Where film might have a support base is the developing world (I love puns!!). The only fly in this ointment is that the developing world is rather low income, so they can't afford a lot, and as this improves, they will want to become high tech quickly, and will either drop film in place of digital and their shiny new computers, or will skip film completely.

About the only thing you can do with a manual film camera that you can't do with a digital camera is shoot film, and I don't think that is going to prove to be enough. Certainly the manufacturers of manual film cameras don't seem to think so. They've gotten out of the film camera business, leaving them as a rump product for smaller manufacturers who also don't seem to be making very many of them.
I just had a look at the Cosina website. They are advertising a few rangefinder bodies, but no SLRs.
A Google search revealed that Vivitar had been bought by Sakar (who appears to own the Tokina brand as well), but the Sakar website is strangely devoid of SLRs, and the Vivitar name, but I was able to find one Vivitar SLR available on Amazon.

So, the tools required to shoot the stuff is no longer being made available as new, which means that the end use is supplied by "legacy" products and all the uncertainty that goes along with them, the labs who support the end user are either ceasing production completely (Qualex) or are suffering low enough volumes that eventually they won't be able to keep their machines in control, and the manufacturers themselves are going out of business, with the ones that are still around dropping products as fast as they can.

I admire your bright and sunny outlook, and I wish I shared it. However, three decades in the lab business, and watching what happened to it in the last decade I was involved with it hasn't let me keep an especially optimistic view of the long term prospects for film users.

[Ratmagiclady]

Ooh. I need to read all the threads, but, yes, I'm curious about the new Ektar, and yes, it's an old name.

But I thought I'd say, many people like to pronounce 'Film is Dead' ....because it's no longer the big consumer convenience you can find anywhere.

I think it's going the way of vinyl in music, which people have been eulogizing since the 8-track came out.

It's not gonna die as long as there are a lot of DJ's and audiophiles out there. We film people are a similar population.

I mean, know what I mean? Just cause it's not in every mall store, and just cause massive quantities of cheap turntables aren't included in every home rack system... doesn't mean there won't be a few bucks to be made by someone for a long time. The *low end* went elsewhere, is all. People still using film will not be the 'low end.'

Did we *really* depend on the value-packs of short rolls of budget Fujicolor at Walgreens, in the first place? Nah, ...and frankly, before digital was *any* kind of practical, the mass market big production machines were making what, ...crappy cameras for the most part.

All that changes is volume and who the target customer is.

The *mass* market is *always* trying to do things like 'kill off 35mm and 120' ...there's a long list of formats that tried it, 620, 126, 127, all the way up to APS-C: a particularly crass attempt to make people buy a lot of products to fix what-wasn't-broke since the Thirties. The mass market comes, goes, and moves on. The good stuff stays, and if a big company won't make it, a small one will.

Personally, I think if Kodak and Fuji and anyone else want to stop putting all their efforts into trying to make and market a more-Kodachrome-like consumer print film, this is not a bad thing, I'd say.

[Ratmagiclady]

"About the only thing you can do with a manual film camera that you can't do with a digital camera is shoot film, and I don't think that is going to prove to be enough. Certainly the manufacturers of manual film cameras don't seem to think so. They've gotten out of the film camera business, leaving them as a rump product for smaller manufacturers who also don't seem to be making very many of them.
I just had a look at the Cosina website. They are advertising a few rangefinder bodies, but no SLRs."

They also make... A profit.

They issued a *screwmount* body for a few years, and *sold them out, too,* and that's while most folks can have a screwmount body that still works off Ebay.

One thing you can do with a film camera that you cannot with a digital is: make something permanent with your own hands.

Coffee grounds and vinegar, if you have to.

You think someone a hundred years from now is gonna dig up your high-performance Mac, make it run, and find their heritage there?

I can't even read my *Word* files from the Nineties.

Digital's lovely for a lot of things, and a practical necessity in others, but it's not the be all and end all of photography.

You never know what's going to be important later.

The world's more photographed than ever in history, but...

How many archival hardcopies are being made?