Kodachrome film - history

Kodachrome film offers photographers a unique colour aesthetic; its palette is different from all other photographic colour emulsions and digital capture colour spaces. It also has the best dark storage archiving properties of any reversal or colour negative film.

Invented by the Leopold's Mannes and Godowsky in 1935, two musicians working for Kodak, the Kodachrome formula has seen a number of changes in its long life but is essentially the same stock today as it was when first launched, providing photographers with the means to capture beautiful, scintillating colour slides of the world around them.

Kodachrome is a black and white film to which coloured dyes are added during processing. Special developers heighten the effect of sharpness at the edges of image objects in the film. This endows an apparent third dimension to the processed two dimensional Kodachrome image, especially when projected, manifest in a clear separation of focus planes. Camera lenses such as those made by Leica, Zeiss, Angenieux, Nikon, Pentax and Olympus OM for example, are ideally matched to obtain superior results from Kodachrome film.

Only Kodachrome 64 remains on Kodak's product list. Buy some today and shoot your favourite subjects. Use a slide projector and find a big white wall to project your slides on; if it's your first experience of using this stock, you may be amazed by the result. Help keep Kodachrome film alive - use it!