Thank you
@koraks for just splitting this into a new thread!
EPM doesn't actually manufacture the film. They're essentially a vendor that specializes in microfilm products, including film (which they sell under their brand name "Imagelink"), for physical archiving. Agfa is the manufacturer of the film, which is internally known as Copex (not to be confused with Copex Rapid, which is a different film).
With specific regard to CMS II 20, EPM is not directly involved. CMS II 20 is just rebranded Agfa Copex (as is Spur Ultra R 800). The problem is that the primary driver for Agfa's production of Copex film is the microfilm archiving market (e.g., libraries, research institutions, etc.); the "art photography" market is just a small slice of the pie. If EPM has closed shop, it must be because there isn't enough global demand for microfilm archiving. So, Agfa is forced to end Copex production all together due to insufficient demand.
Imagelink? Wasn't that a film Kodak sold? Are all these microfilms just produced by Agfa and sold/have been sold under everyone's respective companies?
In regards to EPM "closing shop", there seem to be many other microfilm distributors. Unless I am confusing "distributor" and "vendor" here?
It all seems bizarre, I remember checking BH even just last year and seeing both Copex Rapid and CMS 20. But now to know they'll soon be gone...
Agfa and Agfa-Gevaert Copex products are continuations of Gevaert microfilms. Gevaert was taken over by Agfa effective 1964 after an ugly silver coup to the market.
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What a wealth of information, thank you!
Micro grain single-layer stocks are rather simple to manufacture. Microfilms were highly profitable, the more so after they were made with polyester base. PET(P) is cheaper than TAC, cellulose triacetate. To perforate polyester one needs to resharpen the tooling more often but that can be done even installed on the perforator. Carbide tools last longer but cost three times more than hardened steel punches and dies.
Ah, so that's what TAC is.
Good to hear that it's relatively simple and not made with some secret special sauce. I probably buried my question getting hung up on dry-plates being the old example I knew of an ultra-fine-grained emulsion in practice. I was mainly asking that to see if CMS was hard for a company like ADOX to make in house. Or, heck, maybe improve upon it.
So it it foreseeable for a company or even an amateur to just punch film and not use the rather slow 6-perf holepunch I see around? Something perhaps similar to how perfs are punched industrially?
I should learn machining... My todo list is getting too long.
The amateur movie film market which was initiated by Gaumont in 1899 by the Chrono de poche loaded with 15-mm. film. Edison launched a Home Kinetoscope twelve years later, the film was 7/8 inches wide. Others joined, of course all stock was nitrate film.
Since the introduction of the Pathé-Baby as it was named we have small, lightweight cameras and safety (cellulose triacetate) base films. These can be cemented together with a little press and some chemical solvent. Polyester-base film goes against the amateur filmmaker. The industry never brought affordable heat menders.
I wonder why the active film manufacturers aren’t interested in selling their jumbos for new markets. The 9½-mm. market lies there completely dry. Although Color Film Archives together with the Ciné Club 9,5 de France is offering Kodak Ektachrome 100 D in the Pathé confection the reaction of that community is practially zero. For sure the price is simply beyond acceptable.
16-mm. perforated both sides, the original initial confection, was hard to find. The Film Photography Project has helped substantially with the situation but long rolls of 2-r. are still not available, if one likes to use an Auricon 600 or 1200 for example, or an Arriflex 16 M. 16 2-r. is very helpful for trick work, at making positives quickly, and for serious duplication jobs with badly shrunken and or torn material.
Double-Eight film used to be the home movie format for half a century. It is still alive actually but void of appropriate film stocks. Fomapan R(eversal) 100 has a way too coarsely grained image but a colourless TAC base luckily. Ilford has ceased to convert Pan F to ciné formats in 2003. Efke once made 35-mm. and 16-mm. print stock. Film Ferrania don’t answer to enquiries. Jumbo rolls would be fine, I have contacts to enterprises that can slit to 16 mm within the tolerance given by ISO 69. Perforators are around, too. The small image size needs a very finely grained stock at a moderate price. There are hundreds of thousands of cameras and projectors sitting there idle. The springs are mostly still in order. The mechanisms can be cleaned and lubricated freshly. The optics are not bad. Adox U 17 was the right thing. Kodak Panatomic-X was beautiful. Agfa Isopan F. Foton Fotopan R 50. Du Pont Tempo (ASA 40). Kazan OC-45. Ferrania and 3M-Ferrania MP 28. Fuji Neopan (made by Oriental). Gevaert Micro Pan. Technopan 8. ORWO UP 15. Perutz U 15. Sakura Konipan Reversal (Eastman-Kodak formula). Many more.
Double-Super-8 is still more absurdely treated. All Super-8 film Kodak puts in cartridges is DS-8 for a moment. 16 mm wide strips are perforated 8-S 1-4, then slit. Yet, Ektachrome is not offered in DS-8.
"Jumbos"? Are those uncut wide rolls, by some chance?
You hit on this partially, but yes, one of the main uses of these microfilm stocks that would be fun is in place of smaller formats. In fact, I came upon a user at photo.net who... really really loved his Minox cameras and swore them to be the greatest in the world. One thing that was fascinating to me, and that I hadn't realized, was that the Minox having a Tessar design lens that was physically smaller and would project onto a smaller image circle proportionally increased its spatial resolution. In other words, it's as if the resolution was fixed across the image circle at say N lines or so. If the design is shrunk, the image circle gets smaller but it still resolves the N lines.
Minox cameras use unperforated film and I've seen someone 3D print slitters for 35mm to produce the 9mm wide Minox film.
But examples where merely film width is the problem are few and far between, as you expand on. Greatly.
16mm 2r, you mean perfs on both sides? Why does it have those advantages you state? "trick work"?
I recall you can still order double perf 16mm, after all it seems it's still used for certain high-speed work.
The new Kodak Super-8 camera, it doesn’t have a particular designation or name, is a huge failure. You don’t produce a mirror-shutter camera without reflex view. Rochester would only have needed to offer a new $500 camera and a new $400 projector. The projector compact, lightweight, with a 150-Watt halogen lamp and a well seated lens. Single-8 is currently pushed by Jürgen Lossau and Tak Kohyama.
Kodachrome and Kodachrome II were so successful also because the sensitivity was ASA 10, respective 25, and the image very finegrain. At 16 frames per second and a shutter opening of, say 160 degrees, exposure time is 1/36th second. In sunlight at diaphragm f/5.6 ASA/ISO 10 or 12 is good.
The situation with Kodak's super 8 camera was incredibly frustrating. I forget whether it was the original manufacturer or Kodak the ultimately made the decision, but at CES some years ago they announced it with a high but acceptable pricetag for a new, "modern" super 8mm camera. But when we next got an update they'd upped the price to around 5k.
I am too much of an idealist, but I have this funny dream that one could make a small shop to make high quality 8mm and 16mm equipment. Your idea for a projector to be included in that goes beyond that, seeing as multiple factors, but not the least being the light source and materials caused projectors to be bulky compared to what we could likely do now. Imagine how fun it'd be to take a design similar to one of the portable 8mm projectors that fold up. It would be so cool!
Regardless, my main hangup is, additive manufacturing and CNC probably makes producing a camera of a similar quality to even the old "built-like-a-tank" cameras not just possible but perhaps even quite economical. I haven't ever looked closely at the issue, I just see people open up old home movie cameras and I find myself thinking they're far less complex that stills cameras.
The fine grain you could get on them looks really great, though the fancy new 50D itself looks excellent at such tiny sizes. I kind of want to buy a microscope too when I get a light table lol. I MUST SEE THE GRAIN AND HOW TINY IT GETS!
But, why do you want a film with resolution that high, when most existing films will already out-resolve your lenses?
becauseitssomuchfunjan.mp4
In all honestly, some of the examples on the ADOX site are mindblowing. Additionally, it's in the smaller formats that you are reaping the benefits of higher quality lenses faster than any other, so the power of a combination of a ultra-high-resolution film stock with modern glass can do some incredible stuff. And be very small!
There are pitfalls in understanding, when people quote the 1000:1 contrast resolution, as above.
No lens can produce an MTF of 1000:1 ( = 99.9% MTF ) except at the very lowest spatial frequencies
The film-maker's 1000:1 resolution is probably obtained by putting something like a microscopy bar-pattern directly in contact with the film, and exposing.
Much more important is the 1.6:1 contrast resolution , which is what the film can do when an MTF of 23% is presented onto the emulsion.
I would estimate that the CMS might do 200 to 250 lp/mm on this measure, if it's not been quoted somewhere.
This is still more than most lenses can manage, but the end result of what detail can be achieved on a neg is a combination of the dropping lens MTF as you go up in frequency , with the rising contrast required to get increasing detail to register on the emulsion. It's likely that with CMS 20 , these two curves would cross in the region of 150 cy/mm.
By comparison, with a good 400 iso film like TMY 400, the limit for the best lenses comes out at about 70 to 75 lp/mm ( this from experience doing tests myself on TMY 400 years ago ).
There's probably a diagram somewhere that would help explain this better...
Plus of course, grain level is very important if you want to do big enlargements, and the CMS 20 has very very fine grain.
As Adox themselves have said before, the 1000:1 figure are not without merit. Usually it means you'll reach close to that with far more modest object contrasts. In fact, I see many of Fuji's datasheets put the 1.6:1 resolving power at half the 1000:1 resolution.
And, someone else will need to chime in: are the contrast figures generally better or worse for different color contrasts as opposes to black and white? I don't know what kind of contrast measure that would need to use to be comparable to object contrast measurements, but I have wondered about that.
On paper, Tmax 100 developed in something like Adox XT-3 or Pyrocat-HD (approaching 150 lp/mm) is probably already beyond the clinical capabilities of the best medium and large-format lenses, but I can absolutely say from experience that CMS II 20 is in a league of its own in the drum scans I’ve done on my Howtek. Genuinely amazing film.
Pyrocat, I couldn't really put together what that developer "gives" you, exactly. It's a low-contrast, staining developer, right? What's that typically "give" you?