For Kodachrome Fans, Road Ends at Photo Lab in Kansas NYTimes.com

[Chip Fetrow]

I tend to think Rob is right.  On the other hand, people have done  
some pretty amazing things for no good reason, other than they can.

The NY Times story read that they opened the last bottle of (I believe  
it was) blue dye last week, right on schedule.

I am not going to research it to ensure I am correct, but I believe  
Kodak stopped production the middle of 2009, and the chemicals by the  
end of the year.  They made enough to carry over the existing labs, of  
which I believe there were three at the time, though the one in Japan  
may have already been closed.

Even if you had the stuff, patience, and skill to do the processing  
(or bought the machine from Dwayne's), I don't believe you would be  
able to get the chemicals.

Even E-6 is going away.  Our local quality processor, Ace Photo in  
Ashburn, took the E-6 machine to a nearby parking lot where there was  
paving going on.  They rolled it flat to save space in the dumpster!   
They were not processing enough E-6 to keep it around because the  
chemicals would go out of date before they were used.

Even now, they "generally" run C-41 twice a week, but if they don't  
have enough film to be processed, it is once.  It took me quite a  
while to get my Greenbank film back, especially since they missed my  
medium format roll.

It seems the PRINT business is still good though.  People either e- 
mail pictures, or bring in a CD, DVD (Data), or memory card of some  
sort and ask that they all be printed, or sometimes by number.  They  
still get the colors right so they get my business.

--chip

On Jan 1, 2011, at 1:00 PM, tacos-request at amrad.org wrote:

> Message: 2
> Date: Fri, 31 Dec 2010 19:01:14 -0500
> From: "Robert E. Seastrom" <rs at seastrom.com>
> Subject: Re: For Kodachrome Fans, Road Ends at Photo Lab in Kansas  
> NYTimes.com
>
> Are you dead-on positive that it was Kodachrome that they were doing
> themselves (K-14) not Ektachrome (E-6)?  If so, I'd really love to see
> a write-up on how they did it.  There a no color couplers in
> Kodachrome; it requires that they be added (a dye color at a time)
> during processing.  The process was byzantine enough that there were
> never home chemistry kits for Kodachrome processing (which is why
> Dwayne's shutting down the last extant K-14 line is such big news).
> [...]
> -r