[rollei_list] OT: Kodak Film Formats
- From: Marc James Small <marcsmall@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: rollei_list@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 18 Jul 2010 15:33:53 -0400
At 03:20 PM 7/18/2010, David Sadowski wrote:
>The difference between 120 and 620 is the spool- thinner, I think, for
>620 although I am not sure what the supposed advantage was there.
>
>126 was supposed to (I guess) replace 127. The thought there was to
>eliminate the tricky (for amateurs) film loading procedure by using a
>cartridge. But the film inside the cartridge was the same essentially
>as 828, right?
620's thinner spools allowed slimmer cameras was
the excuse used by Kodak but as 620 cameras are
regularly converted to take 120, this seems to
have been a bogus matter and, in the end, Kodak
simply was making a film which would only fit Kodak cameras.
126 was decidedly not meant to replace 127; it
was meant to replace 135 in amateur circles. The
format failed due to the inability to secure a
flat film surface, though quite a few nice cameras were made in this format.
Film quality improved by leaps and bounds over
the years -- a professional level 127 camera in
1970 could have produced the same quality of
print that a 120 camera yielded in 1960, but
Hasselblad and Franke & Heidecke were both asleep
at the switch, or else we would have had
127-format teensy-weenzy Hassies used by pros in
the 1970's. But one afterthought on this
improvement was 110, which was supposed to yield
135 quality in a more user-friendly format. It
was not a bad idea: I have an underwater 110
camera behind me as I write, and you can still
get 110 film, so the idea must have had some adherents.
828 I cannot explain but, then, I've never put a
lot of thought to why the format was
produced. Maybe there is something in McKeown,
who has a section on film formats.
The explosion in silver prices had a minimal
effect on black and white film production but
that was already being threatened by the
Eco-Nuts, who were insisting that silver be
reduced. The industry responded to the increase
in silver prices by modifying processing line to
recover silver and to keep it out of the effluent
discharge. For many years, home processors could
buy devices to put in their chemistry to recover
the silver: some guys I know made some money
doing this back in the day. Then the Hunt
brothers ran up the price and busted it, and
silver fell dramatically, around 1979.
Marc
msmall@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Cha robh bàs fir gun ghràs fir!
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