Kodak To Stop Making Black and White Paper

Swirsky writes "For those of us who remember spending quality time in a dark room with Kodak Rapid RC paper and a bottle of Dektol, here's some bad news - Kodak will stop making black and white photographic paper. Black and white photo work (especially because you can use a safelight!) is a wonderful way of introducing someone to photography. I guess if we want to do it, we'll have to use home-made emulsions on paper. As a pro photographer, I'm bothered by this, though admittedly I haven't done b/w darkroom work in years."

Who cares ....

[anagama]

Ilford fine grain semi-matte was always way better than any muddy paper kodak made.

Or Portriga -- Agfa is good too.

Digital?

[khrtt]

Digital has never been Kodak's strong side. They made a comparatively decent digital camera way back when, when no one was making good digital cameras anyways. So, WTF?

Re:Image editing..

[Dancin_Santa]

It's like asking why someone would load Linux on a G5 when they've already got Mac OSX pre-installed. The reason people stick with film is because it simply one of those old habits that die hard.

At ISO135, there is no film that can outperform a modern DSLR's sensor. In addition, a DSLR can take many more shots before a change of media is required. In many cases, the film winds up being computer-scanned anyway, so the loss of resolution during the scanning stage drops the "actual" film resolution by a huge amount. Once in the computer, the scanned film image can be digitally manipulated the same as any image from a digital camera, so there is no benefit either way.

If the photographer wishes to use an optical enlarger, the limitations of the enlarging lens is a factor in the quality of the print. Many enlargers have barrel distortion in the corners. DSLRs do not have this issue because the sensors are typically smaller than the image circle of the lens, so it is a crop of the "best" area of the lens (which is also why they refer to a 1.5x multiplier for lenses not specifically made for digital cameras).

Re:Who cares ....

[peginald]

Other posters pointed out Agfa have gone bust - and Ilford went bankrupt in Sept 2004, although the rights to their papers were sold to Harmon Technology Ltd. No idea how they're doing.
I hope that someone continues to make good b&w paper - surely even if conventional film completely disappeared, there would be a small market for b&w prints?

Re:Digital?

[Anonymous Coward]

Kodak owns many patents on digital sensors and makes a bundle licensing those to the rest of the digital camera makers.

Kodak *is* digital.

Re:Who uses kodak B&W paper?

[cei]

Agreed 100%. That's the response that I've given on the 3 or 4 photo mailing lists that I'm on. I know a LOT of photographers still doing traditional B&W printing, but all of them use Ilford, Berger, Kentmere or Agfa. Not a single one uses Kodak for B&W paper.

Re:Who uses kodak B&W paper?

[cei]

FUD. It got out of receivership [ilford.com] in Feb 2005.

Re:Who cares ....

[theshowmecanuck]

Oriental 'Seagull' photographic paper (orientalphotousa.com) is still around and is a GREAT paper. Ansel Adams used to use it. I find it has a slightly brown tone, however if you give it a rinse in selenium toner (very dilute... like for archiving purposes, or less) the tones change to very black blacks, and very white whites. It is a fibre based paper though, so if you like to use resin coated, you won't like it. However, once you see what fibre based papers look like, you probably won't like resin coated again anyway. WAY better tones in fibre based paper.

Re:Who cares ....

[ozmanjusri]

Ilford appears to have recovered well from their bankruptcy, and Kentmere and Foma are still making great paper. I don't think b&w will be going anywhere soon.

Somewhat sad, but

[zakezuke]

Don't get me wrong... I still like film as a medium. It's beautiful, high resolution per volume, and requires pretty base fundamental technologies. That old medium or large format camera from the early 20th century is still going to outperform digital in terms of raw resolution. Small format is debatable, esp since color resolution was getting close to that of old B&W the last time I checked. Contact prints, while lossy, is as low tech as you can get. I use to get away with using an old slide projector and an easel on the wall.

But who wants to work in a dark room? You've got the chemistry issue, bulky enlarger issue, and making a room light tight issue, not to speak of working under a safe light. And the printer market is so saturated that you can get an entry level photo printer for $100, an a5 dye sub for $300 and laser for $400. HP has their own photo gray cart for their printers, or you can go with bulk ink and B&W multitone ink.

http://www.lyson.com/quad-black-tone.html [lyson.com]
http://www.inksupply.com/bwpage.cfm [inksupply.com]
http://www.weink.com/ecom/catalog/chromiumbw_-_mak e_your_own_b_w_ink_kits_4228684.htm [weink.com]

If I was going to get back into B&W imagery... I'd get my self a $100 Canon i960 inkjet printer if not an Epson, hex black tone ink, and go print happy. Lots of control, buckish/page, Ilford classic pearl paper, and go print happy.

Re:Mod parent DOWN

[troc]

Exactly, "wet" photography has a significantly greater dynamic range than digital. However it is easier to make a photo with a very large dynamic range using digital cameras and Photoshop. Needs a tripod.

Simply set up camera and tripod (this is excellend for landscapes). Expose for the sky, take image (foreground vastly underexposed). Expose for foreground, take image (sky blown out). Take a few more at other exposures, maybe to get the exposure of a flower or the sea or something. Important bit is that the tripod doesn't move :) (mirror lock up blah blah blah)

Put them all into PS and use the combine function whose name escapes me and it will stitch them together using the whole range of exposures. For example, the average decent digital SLR can expose around 6 levels of exposure (8 for generic film). Doing this you can easily get a photo with 10+ exposure levels which means everything in the photo is properly exposed.

To do the same with film requires various gradient filters and eitehr blind luck (me) or lots of knowledge (photo pro)

Hmm

Troc.

Re:Image editing..

[famebait]

"Solarize" and "posterize" are right there on the menu in any decent photo app. They are essentially just simple curve manipulations and really simple to copy in software. The ice thing might be more complex; haven't seen the effect myself.

I'm sure hands-on darkroom work is enjoyable and has a completely different feel to it than digital, and I can understand why many photographers stick with it. But the claim that you can technically do things you can't on a computer is, when it comes to the finished image, mostly just not true. Barring the effects your state of mind have on what you choose to do, of course.

Re:Image editing..

[EnderWigginsXenocide]

you: At ISO135, there is no film that can outperform a modern DSLR's sensor. me: But, a $50 Pentax body with a $150 pentax lens and a $6 roll of film is only SLIGHTLY beaten out by a 12+megapixel camera costing well over $2000. Pentax, olympus, minolta, etc. Aslong as we're talkinga serious camera company a 50mm f1.7 is going to lay down some serious resolution. And, this is 35mm. When I'm going for commercial work I bring out the 8x10 and shoot ISO/ASA100 transparencies. Scanned at 2000 DPI you get 8x2000x10x2000)pixels. Approximately 320,000,000 pixels. Granted we're not talking snapshots. We are talking images intended for billboards with dimensions measured in tens of meters. But digital does not come CLOSE to the quality that film can deliver. Folks who replace their $200 film point and shoot with a $400 digital won't care. When you're going for images that must make an impact from over a quarter mile away digital falls short (printing a pixel as a 3 inch tall block just won't cut it.)

Re:Take your prefered pixelbased graphic program..

[aldeng]

Wrong. Just plain wrong. This comment represents a complete misunderstanding of how black and white film, color film and digital image sensors work. It takes a whole hell of a lot more work to make a digital picture look good in black and white than just greyscaling it.

Ilford

[pvera]

Sure, Kodak is stopping production, but they are not the only ones that make quality B&W photo paper. Ever heard of Ilford?

When the news came out a couple days ago I thought it was a shame since I used to develop my own B&W film, but quickly realized that even back then I was scanning my films. I almost never printed them so at least in my particular case there is no real loss.

And sure, we got digital, but in over 5 years shooting digital I am still not too happy with my B&W results. It is nice to know that I can grab a manual camera and shoot some Kodak PLUS-X 125 if I feel like it.

Kodak DCS 760M (monochrome)

[i22y]

Such an animal does exist... or at least did exist. Check out the Kodak DCS 760M [luminous-landscape.com], which is now discontinued. It was a monochrome-only B&W professional digital SLR. While it's not 32-bit, it did yield fantastic images.

Mike

Re:Mod parent DOWN

[mlyle]

Why can't the camera do say 5 exposures centered on the "correct" shutter-time, so that if "correct" is 1/50s it'll take 1/250 1/100 1/50 1/25 and 1/15 ?

Check your camera manual. It's called AEB in your camera I believe (auto-exposure bracketing). Though I think you only get 3 exposures.

Re:Image editing..

[djdanlib]

For example...

Reciprocity failure.

That's when your exposure SHOULD be one thing by mathematics, but it doesn't come out right - so you have to change it to something else that SHOULD be wrong instead. There are tables of that data everywhere.

I'd really like to see some smart chemist or mathematician try to figure that one out!

Re:Image editing..

[Anonymous Coward]

air quality improves

If I break both your legs, and one leg heals, you're still worse off than initially. Would you be comparing with the mid-19th century or mid-15th?

haven't run out of oil

If I give you 14 oranges, and you eat one on the first day, doubling your intake each day, you are right that you still have oranges left on the third day.

transistors haven't hit a limit

if I give you a piece of string 1m long, you can probably half it a good five dozen times using the mighty power of scissors alone. Call me back when your awesome axis of technological advancement overcomes the laws of physics itself to create useful strings of subatomic length.

there is a world market for more than four computers

Hey, there's no doubt Thomas Watson was an efficient contributor to genocide, but his naive marketing statement hidden in your list of attempts to the debunk the laws of physics might just contribute towards the delusions of grandeur of the Watson estate.

phones no longer need copper wiring

Phones never needed copper wiring, it was just considered one of the more efficient transmission media at the time.

we grow food with less land and water than ever before

We outsource most of our farming (I guess you are in England like I am), so we don't really do much growing at all. If you want to cite studies discussing both efficiency and nutrient value and would be interested... this is the only item on your list that is neither blatantly false nor asinine.

Re:Image editing..

[CausticPuppy]

If it's resolution, well, check out The Gigapixel Project.

You do realize that the Gigapixel project uses a film camera, not a digital camera, right?

Read the FAQ [gigapxl.org] on the site that you linked to. The images are exposed on large format film, and then scanned in with a high resolution scanner.

Re:Mod parent DOWN

[Grevling]

My Canon Power Shot G5 [canon.com] will take three photos in succession in AEB mode after pressing just once (if no flash is in use).

Re:This occured to me, too

[njcoder]

This doesn't really matter. It's been years since Kodak has been the top bw paper manufacturer. It seems that the majority of their sales have been to more professional labs than to the small darkroom market. The biggest supplier is probably Ilford. There are also other less popular manufacturers that make what some people consider higher quality paper such as Oriental. These companies are smaller and they can make a successful business case for continuing to produce bw paper more thann Kodak can.

I've probably made thousands of black and white prints and I have never printed on kodak black and white paper. Although I do like their color papers when I print color.

I shoot digital as well as traditional film and I do my own printing for color and black and white as well as color and I also send stuff out to digital printers as well. Traditional film printing, especially from larger negatives can be a lot nicer than digital. Especially when it comes to black and white. A nice hand printed black and white print on fiber paper has a certain depth and richness that you can't achive on dye based papers.

There's no need to start making your own emulsions. There are still plenty of other options.

Re:uninformed ./ posts annoy me

[Teancum]

It is way too bad that the parent posting here was AC instead of somebody who posted with his name. I wish it would be modded up more.

I have experience with both chemical (traditional) photography and digitial photography and imaging. In the latter I've spent quite a bit on display systems on a professional engineering basis and am quite familiar with the issues on that end as well.

Digital photography can be as good as traditional photography, but there is a long road ahead when you find companies that suggest color depth and range are "good enough". This is usually the result of some manager who knows little if anything about the underlying technology but instead doesn't want to throw more money at improving technologies when the end customer, in their opinion, won't notice a difference. Often they are correct in terms of immediate need, but that also effectively kills any future push to improve once the line has been drawn.

To Kodak's credit, when they developed the PCD image format, they included by far the best dynamic range specification than any other digital encoding format. Unfortunately for them (and the rest of us), they kept it propritary, under lock and key with annoying patents and licensing issues incompatable with the GPL (and other nasty problems) so it is seldom if ever used.

The problem with digital imaging is that when you get to extreme ends of the color space (near black or near white, deep red, etc.) is where you most often notice color differences. Particularly near black your eye can percieve a tremendous difference in shades, as your eyes are logrithmic in nature in terms of sensitivity. This is true even with gamma corrected images, but the gamma does help out quite a bit.

Another huge issue that occurs with color (as opposed to monochrome or greyscale images) is that the RGB colorspace (or related CMY) is almost written in stone as the only possible color space, ignoring that people can see more than just three colors. I won't belabor this point, but most people are simply blind on what could be seen with digital photography simply because digital camera and display equipment forces you into seeing through the RGB blinders. It is so common and pervasive that few want to go beyond and try for more color richness. Traditional photography, while still using color filters on its negatives, offers more dynamic range even on colors than what you would see on a computer monitor.

I would also have to agree with the parent poster that people going into photography for the first time (young kids just starting out) are going to get the ultimate garbage digital photographs.

On the other hand, from my experience with digital photography and unlike chemical photography, you can get those kids to take hundreds if not thousands of photographs, and dump the garbage ones that don't have any value. This is a two-edge sword as well because good photographers will try to follow some artistic guidelines in terms of framing the shot, composition of the scene, etc., while somebody taking random shots of everything they look at is going to produce much more garbage shots that should be immediately discarded.

Still, I've handed my kids a digital camera to take on class field trips, and I have been able to get a few very good photos from their experience. And it is neat to get a visual view of life as a 7 year old... something that I have taken for granted at times.

Re:B&W is hardly dead...

[Anonymous Drunkard]

Kodak can sit and spin, they aren't the only supplier of B&W paper. It'd be worse if they got rid of their chemicals, which I do use, but also wouldn't be the end of the world.

All of Eastman's chemical formulae are published, and have been for decades. D-72, D-76, Dektol, you name the chemical and I guarantee you Kodak has published the formula in a ring-binder book available to the public.

If Kodak stops making chemicals tomorrow, you have the tools to put together the hydroquinone, para-aminophenol sulphate, and other ingredients together to make your own.

And no, I don't shoot-and-soup anymore, but when I did (over two decades ago), I used Agfa Rodinal on the negatives - 120 Panatomic X was a symphony with that stuff.