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posted by martyb on Thursday June 07 2018, @09:54PM   Printer-friendly
from the Film-At-11-Maybe...-Or-Maybe-Not... dept.

It's easy to think that film cameras are gone forever. But Marketplace has a short story about how Kodak is apparently close to re-releasing the Ektachrome 100 film line. Tweet as covered in the story.

There's news that Kodak is about to bring back Ektachrome 100, a popular slide film for analog cameras, that's been gone for five years. Launched in the 1940s, Ektachrome was one of the first commercially available color films and became the "preferred choice of magazine and advertising shooters." (It was a favorite of National Geographic.)

As far as I can tell, the development has been hanging for quite some time as here is one among several stories back from January of 2017 stating it was coming back. I guess software isn't the only industry that suffers from vaporware potential. Marketplace's question could also be asked here: What pieces of discontinued technology do you wish would come back?


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  • (Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Thursday June 07 2018, @11:20PM (2 children)

    by PartTimeZombie (4827) on Thursday June 07 2018, @11:20PM (#690114)

    ...it's still unclear what is the market for this film.

    That is entirely a fair question and I suspect the answer is film enthusiasts, although that's probably not helpful.

    They told me some enterprising bloke in Croatia (I think) had bough the polaroid equipment and set up back home to produce film. I am sure his costs would have been llow enough to make a profit, even with much lower volumes.

    That might be the future for Kodak or Fujifilm.

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  • (Score: 1) by tftp on Thursday June 07 2018, @11:51PM (1 child)

    by tftp (806) on Thursday June 07 2018, @11:51PM (#690121) Homepage

    film enthusiasts [...] That might be the future for Kodak or Fujifilm.

    I was considering that, but there are too few of them to support the production. The factory is profitable only when it ships miles of film per day - and tens of development machines, and plenty of chemicals for them.

    • (Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Friday June 08 2018, @01:46AM

      by PartTimeZombie (4827) on Friday June 08 2018, @01:46AM (#690150)

      I'm sure you're right. Kodak or Fuji are going to have huge overheads.

      The suggestion was that some enerprising person might buy the equipment and rights to the name and set up somewhere lower cost (like Croatia).

      That might be profitable.