I can’t quite believe that Kodachrome film has come to its end. See the story here. This is the film of my grandfather, father and myself. I really expected, despite the dominance of digital cameras and media, that Kodachome, especially Kodachrome 25, would withstand the digital deluge. Superior grain, true colors and nearly archival slide life (grandfathers pictures have stood the test of 50++ years of time) would spare Kodachrome. I still have a Nikon FM1 which has been loaded with Kodachrome over the years. Where to go now?
Kodak the parent company has not weathered the digital revolution much better. Always trying to defy, delay and deluxe price the digital wave – it has been swamped and now hangs on by a printing and compact camera thread to former glory days. The French have a great phrase – c’est dommage.
And now archival questions loom again. The whole problem with digital media such as disk drives, CDs, and DVDs is they have two half-lives associated with them. First the digital media they are stored on originally had a life of 2-5 years before the disks started to self-destruct and fail. The second half-life is the rapid movement of technology itself – I have pictures of unknown quality stored on floppy disks, Iomega drives, old 20MB disk drives, and 100MB tapedrives for which drivers are impossible to find. I have had to migrate my libraries at least a half a dozen times to keep up with the latest in media and storage technology. Meanwhile my Kodachrome slide are as good as new over that same period of time. I have become convinced I will have to print what I want to save onto archival papers to hope to preserve the images.
We have had a lot of RIP stories of late – all about technology’s rapid change. And so it is a fond farewell to Kodachrome – a film that served so well.