Undated Kodachrome slides ? date

[Andrew]

Just been looking through some boxes of other peoples old slides that I bought a few years ago in house clearance shops.

One box has a mix of slides marked 'made in england' with no obvious date. I thought Kodak always stamped or printed the processing date ?. Does anyone know when this became common practice ?.

In the same box are some Kodachrome slides marked 'made in usa' and these do have a printed date - Aug 61.

The colours are as good as original, by holding them up to daylight.

Another box has a collection of UK architectural photos taken on Ilford slide filem and they are very dark. Either they are badly done slide copies or the camera had an exposure fault, or maybe Ilford slide film goes darker blue with age.

Interestingly there are quite a few commercial slides of USA historical sites, but unlike the classical commercial slides that turn bright red after a short while, these still have original colours, possibly Kodachrome though the slide mount doesn't say so.

[John Rumm]

I have lots of cardboard mounted kodachrome from the late 60's early

70's that my FiL took. Stamped mode in england, but none dated IIRC.

Not sure if that tell you much?

all mine are UK...

Yup same here - I did scan them some years back. Kodachrome tend to scan with a slightly blue cast.

[Andrew]

Some of the old Kodachrome slides with card mounts have 1970 and 1974 printed on them, so I guess any without are 1960's.

I think Kodachrome was only ever sold with a pre-paid development envelope in Europe, while in the states it was sold without the cost of development. In the states there were a number of private labs doing Kodachrome processing. In Europe Kodak did it themselves (using a 12-stage process involving nasty chemicals and an additional light exposure stage).

[Andrew]

Where have they been stored ?. If they had been in a deep freeze in a sealed dry box then they might be ok, else try this place -

[Tim Streater]

Perhaps it depended where they were processed. Most of mine were done in Lausanne, and were dated.

[Cursitor Doom]

Give it a go - you might be pleasantly surprised! IME *old* B&W film once developed comes out very grainy, as if the speed rating were much higher than it actually was. This can give the old shots a really atmospheric feel. Aside from that, if they don't come out at all, the photolab will normally not print from them or charge you anything, either.

[Andrew]

As Kodak slowly shut down its european Kodachrome processing sites all the films were sent to Lausanne. The UK mailers used to have a Hemel Hempstead address but may be the films were spliced into bulk reels and sent to Switzerland for processing. AT the very end all Kodachrome went to somewhere in Texas, Dwaynes I think.

[NY]

I've checked my dad's slides. Unfortunately all the ones of their wedding and their honeymoon in 1962 are in plastic mounts with glass covering both sides of the film, or else are in Agfa mounts which have always been undated.

At a quick check (without pulling out *all* the reels of slides) the earliest dated Kodachrome slides are 1969 and all the ones after that are dated. I'm not sure that Agfa and Fuji dated their slides. I think Agfa may have used dark blue / white plastic mounts rather than cardboard ones, which don't lend themselves to being stamped with a date.

The earliest slides I can find are some that my mum took in the late 50s or very early 60s, on a camera that uses film whose frame is fractionally larger than 35 mm. It still uses the same size mount - only the cut-out for the film is a different size.

My scanner can correct for dirt on the film by shining infra-red through: it is not absorbed by the emulsion but it is by dirt/dust. That allows dirt to be identified separate from the image, so interpolation can fill in what would have been there. Except that Kodachrome emulsion *does* differentially absorb IR (ie it varies in different parts of the picture), so the results for dirt removal are not as good as with Agfa, Fuji or Kodak Ektachrome.

I've not had problems with Kodachrome giving blue scans, though it is a little bit more cold and "clinical" than the other films I've mentioned.

For some reason, Kodachrome emulsion looks a lot coarser in grain when I scan the slide than it does in real life: not much better that Ektachrome

200. And the "grain removal" algorithm on my scanner seems to produce better results with Ektachrome 200 or 400 than the results with/without grain removal on Kodachrome - weird.

[NY]

I never knew that any private labs (in the USA, at least) did processing of Kodachrome, whereas most places that developed and printed negative film also processed Ektachrome, Agfachrome and Fujichrome. I only ever had one bad film or processing and that was with Ektachrome - some photos I took of one of the school plays that I worked on a a lighting technician. That came back rather blue, underexposed and muddy. I'm sure I set the film speed correct on the camera, so it was either a manufacturing fault or a processing fault. Both Kodak and the processing shop that I used examined the film and couldn't explain it.

[Peter Johnson]

Kodak wasn't allowed to have a monopoly on processing Kodachrome in the US.

[Roger Mills]

Do the pictures themselves give any clues? You can sometimes get an approximate date based on any cars in the photo, or on what people were wearing.

[Tim Streater]

In the US there was some legal argy-bargy meaning that Kodak couldn't insist you used their lab for processing (as they could and did elsewhere). So it was sold without a mailer bag for prepaid processing. You could still get those bags, but you had to buy them separately (which I always did). The effect was that others could get into the business of processing Kodachrome slides.

[John Rumm]

Actually I take back what I said partially - I noticed I had one sat on my desk, and it lacked the made in england, and on close inspection its embossed[1] with Jan 74

[1] Which may mean it was impact printed and the machine lacked ink!

Yup I have developed my own colour reversal film (E6 process three stages) but never tried a kodachrome. I think it had benn refined down to six stages, but as you say, still involved a re-exposure stage.

[John Rumm]

Yup, my scanner (Nikon LS2000) does the same Digital ICE thing with the IR light. That may be related to the slight cast you get on the scan that you don't see on the projected version.

Yup - a "cool" feel rather than blue is possibly a better description.

I have not noticed the grain particularly - slightly more than Velvia - but then that was 50 ASA.

[John Rumm]

Its is, with a tiny negative inside. Having said that I did manage to develop one by lacing the film through the slots in the sides of the spiral that I used for 35mm!

(IIRC the whole film was only about 12" long)

[Brian Gaff (Sofa]

Funny about colour. I remember many years ago seeing some pictures all taken at the same time,but some on Kodak and some on Agfa. The Kodak ones if anything seemed to be vibrant, whereas the Agfa ones tended to look low in saturation. It was a long time ago now and of course I can't see them now, but you mentioned Ilford. I do remember using Ilford for a trip to Heathrow when I was a little person and was rather disappointed by the unnatural colours they seemed to have. A lack of yellows. Brian

[NY]

Yes, E6 does the reversal by chemical means after first removing the exposed silver, but Kodachrome exposes the film to a measured about of uniform light to expose the remaining silver salts to produce the image.

Sad to think that all this has been overtaken by modern technology, and that future generations will not have the "joys" of working in a darkroom, fumbling around trying to get the film to catch onto the developing spiral and to feed in cleanly, having to do that in *complete* darkness and by feel alone. And then the sweet smell of the developer and the acrid smell of the fixer. Making test strips to gauge the correct exposure of a print from a negative - which varies depending on how large you make it (move the enlarger away to get a bigger print, so the same amount of light is spread "more thinly" across the paper). I didn't have fancy things like a light sensor to estimate the correct print exposure, nor even a big clockwork clock to count the seconds - I counted the seconds by the second hand of my watch. And my darkroom was up in the loft: there wasn't height for a table so the enlarger was on the floor and I knelt in front of it with the dishes of chemicals beside it. It was cold in winter and oppressively hot in summer.

I tried a couple of reversal films. One was an incredible slow Agfa B&W film - something like 8 ASA - and the results were a bit muddy: I may have overdeveloped after the reversal. The other was normal Ilford FP4, developed with a reversal kit. That gave surprisingly good results.

I steered clear of processing colour (reversal or negative) because of the much tighter tolerances on temperature which can give a colour cast as well as just film that is too light/dark, though I did get good results with the Ilford B&W film that was developed using C41 like colour negs.

[John Rumm]

Yeah I kind of cheated a bit. Got a second hand Jobo CPE2 (with lift) rotary processor. That had a temperature controlled water bath so that you could keep the whole process on the right temp. I transferred films to spiral and the drum in a changing bag. Processing was done on the kitchen worktop, next to the sink in daylight :-)

Once I had the film, and then scanned it and printed digitally if I needed prints.

[Andrew]

In fact they used to, and refused to sell the chemicals to private labs. This resulted in an anti-trust legal battle which Kodak lost. From then on Kodak supplied the chemicals, ?processing equipment, and expertise to the private labs who did all the processing.

This is why the cost of a 35mm Kodachrome film in the USA did not include processing, as it carried on so everywhere else in the world.

[Andrew]

It still is, ?XP2 still on sale. Local Boots had a small selection of 35mm films when I was there a few weeks ago. Kodak Ektar is also still made. Although a C41 colour negative film it seems to be sharper than the standard print films. I just get a minilab to develop them and I scan them myself.