Not directly related, but Fujufilm recently announced that one of their popular digital point and shoot cameras (X100V) will no longer be available for some time. It's been in exceptionally high demand this year and they're having trouble sourcing parts. The camera blew up on TikTok and had been pretty hard to find in stock. The X100V has digital film simulation so you can select the same 'look' that you would get with various Fujifilm 35mm films. The simulation capability isn't half bad.
Fuji has had the film simulations since the original first-gen X100. Every generation gets faster, has better AF and an added film sim or two. The first and second generation are slow by today's standards and AF is not fast or reliable, but generation three ("X100T") and four ("X100F") are quite good and available used. Generation five ("X100V") did get a new lens that's somewhat sharper as well, but it's probably not why you buy an X100.
And the slow AF for the the X100 and X100S wasn’t too much of a problem because the vast majority of the buyers for those two were already film rangefinder enthusiasts who knew how to manual focus/zone focus.
I find it a little interesting that the X100V is blowing up the way it is given that the X100 line is known for its learning curve, but if it means more people learning how to manual focus/zone focus/manual exposure, I’m all for it.
Is there a reason to prefer that the camera applies these effects at capture time, rather than doing it later in a photo management program like Lightroom or Apple Photos?
This is a good question and I was actually thinking about this today. The filters are on camera but you can actually get some filters for the X100V on Lightroom a well. I think the on-camera filters and the filters you can use w/ Lightroom are specifically meant for the RAW files off of the X100V. I am not sure you can apply them to let's say Canon's RAW files, but I haven't tried.
They're also likely repurposing the factory/component capacity to start manufacturing the next generation using their new XTrans V sensor (the X100V uses an XTrans IV). I'm an X100V owner and the camera lives up to the hype. I'll probably preorder the next one.
Interesting to see this now, because a few months ago, color 35mm film was sold out everywhere and prices went up a couple of dollars per roll. Kodak in particular seemed to be sold clean out. The local shop had nothing but novelty color tinted film for about 2 months, and B&H would sell out of Portra within a day or two of restocking. I had guessed that film maybe was a late-coming Covid activity trend and the manufacturers didn't anticipate such a big increase in demand.
I actually quite like Fuji stuff, so I guess I'll try to grab a few rolls from the local shop before they sell out. Ironically Kodak inventory now seems to be fine.
Color neg has been incredibly hard to find all this year, and on top of Kodak's price increases last year, retailers were price gouging in relation to supply. Once I burned through my stockpile, I was basically just shooting B&W stock and digital for a while. It is interesting to see Fuji having supply issues now, though. I wonder if it's related to them cutting Pro400h and C200 previously.
It's unsurprising as film, especially the higher end film, uses quite a lot of sophisticated and hazardous chemicals that are getting much more expensive every year to produce.
> It's unsurprising as film, especially the higher end film, uses quite a lot of… hazardous chemicals that are getting much more expensive every year to produce
This was a very negative take (no pun intended). What citations do you have for the “hazardous” nature of film production? Rather than the popularity of film causing the availability problems?
Having done darkroom development for work, I can testify that film developing is toxic and creates significant amounts of hazardous waste that can't just go down the drain (anymore).
Whether or not that's a factor here is hard to say, but the decline in film use can only lead to lesser availability and higher prices for the chemicals it requires. Improved standards for waste management also make it more difficult and expensive to deal with the waste stream than it was 30 years ago.
That simply isn’t true. With B&W the only aspect of film development that poses environmental worries is the silver suspended in exhausted fixer. You’d have to be doing much more exotic work to require more precautions. Things like Selenium toning, perchlorate (ugh, nasty stuff) activators, potassium ferricyanide, etc. need more care but the processes that use those things are really rare these days. Developer compounds break down rapidly and stop bath is just a mild acidic solution, usually the equivalent of vinegar. With the exception of the fixer, home darkroom work is of no environmental consequence. Kodak, Fuji, and Agfa had gotten chemical safety figured out by the 90s. The last thing I remember being a problem was the stabilizers made from formulin (related to formaldehyde) but that was stopped in the late 90s. Think VPS was the last film that required it for the best archival performance.
Large quantities of developer/stop/bleach were also able to be disposed of once the ph had been neutralized. The only disposal service I remember with the labs I worked in was the silver recovery for the fixer.
As far as manufacturing films and papers goes I’m less certain. I do know that Kodak had been trimming some materials from their catalog that used dangerous materials through the 90s. They discontinued a warm tone paper that was loved by many in the early 2000s. It used cadmium as part of the emulsion chemistry. And while it didn’t pose any risk to people using the paper, manufacturing it certainly did. I’m sure that the big three film manufacturers had managed to minimize the use of dangerous materials as awareness and regulations spread. Can’t be as sure about the eastern European manufacturers though.
With "modern" commercial B&W developers, this is all true.
However, pyro (in various forms) is still available, still used by some photographers who prefer the results they get with it, and still quite toxic. You do have to go out of your way to find it, though.
I loved my pyro developers! Loved both PMK and the really old school versions as well. And yes, those are nasty but as you say they are really rare. I also think the raw materials are much more dangerous than working solutions. PMK was heavily diluted to make a working solution.
Pyro does give some very sharp results! Although these days, HC-110 does everything I need and it lasts forever on the shelf, so my pyro days are past me.
I worked in minilabs back in their last days. We were careful about what could go down the drain and what couldn't, but interestingly I don't think we paid anything to deal with the waste chemicals. They had to go through a recovery process that could then get dumped down the drain, but the waste actually contained silver (famously intertwined with film chemistry through history), and I think those recovery filters may actually have been provided to the company for free because the revenue came from re-cycling the silver.
Yup. Once the silver was removed from the blix and things were ph neutral they could be sent down the drain. Safe chemical disposal was (eventually) one of the prime criteria used for formulating photo chemicals.
I never touched black and white professionally except C-41 chromogenic (color film that only renders black and white). I don't have any deep understanding of the chemistry, but what I've been told is that all film contains silver, but in color film all the silver compounds are removed and replaced with dyes or pigments (I don't know the tech here) in their development process. Developing accurate and stable color was the holy grail of film photography and was mostly accomplished by the 90's.
My understanding is that the silver chemistry is left in black and white negatives and positives and is extremely stable, which is why photographs from the beginning era of photography can be viewed like the day they were developed provided the substrate was stable and maintained well. For instance, Harvard's observatory has an archive of glass negatives that go back to the 19th century and can still be useful for historical data.
Thanks, I appreciate the explanation! I wasn't aware of it, I've only hobbied with B/W back in the day because it's so much easier (much less complex chemicals, being able to use red light in the dark room during printing)
Nope. All photographic film and paper processing result in silver ending up in the fixer. B&W films have a much greater concentration of silver than color films do but labs tended to develop so much film and paper that it added up.
Film is "coming back" a little bit, much like vinyl records. I am hoping that this helps keep prices from going up, because film photography has already become quite an expensive hobby. Film alone is expensive now ($15 for 36 exposures for 35mm, for the good stuff), even if you develop and scan your own negatives.
I didn't get the impression that it was said as a negative critique of film, but if you want citations in that direction it's easy. Just look up all the crap the Kodak plant has been found to dump into the water/environment around Rochester. Lots of dioxins, carcinogens, etc. Tons of methylene chloride just to name one example. It's a giant chemical production plant, what do you really expect? GMO kelp and rainbow farts?
https://www.dpreview.com/news/2895882637/fujifilm-japan-is-t...