Navigation
- Canon Support Pages
- Current Films for 35 mm Photography
- Kodachrome and Processing
- Processing Kodachrome before December 30, 2010
- Processing Kodachrome After December 30, 2010
- Type LR544 Batteries for A-1, AE-1, AV-1, AT-1, AL-1
- Replacements for mercury batteries
- Batteries for the Canon Flash Coupler L
Canon Support Pages
All these links open in a new tab or window. If a Canon product is currently offered, you can find it easily through their product links from the main page. If it has been manufactured in the last ten years or so, you can likely find a link from the support page to the original page that was used to offer the camera when it was currently sold, with links to software and drivers, manuals and brochures in PDF format, accessories, specifications, etc. The Canon Camera Museum has almost every camera and lens ever offered by Canon all the way back to the Kwanon prototype in 1933. The latest offerings which may take a few months to appear.
Current Films
Kodak currently advertises Ektar 100 Professional as having "The World's Finest Grain." When I personally have evaluated it for recording capability in lines per millimeter and megapixels per frame, I will post those results here. This is difficult to do with any assurance and I will not rush the process.
Click on the picture of the roll of Ektar 100 Professional to go to the Kodak page on this film.
There are other fine films out there. I will lose the ability to test them after I sell off my film camera gear on eBay. User contributions of film resolution determinations are encouraged, and will be attributed to the contributor. Anything you do must have the following attributes.
- Verifiable by me. Send the scans as the come off the scanner, along with any analysis you have performed, including images produced from the original from the scanner. Give the scanner make and model number.
- Your results must be reproducible by others. Give a clear description of the film used, including lot number, expiration date, or other identification as well as manufacturer and type. Give the lighting used, the camera and lens, subject description (the 1951 USAF Resolution Test Target is good) and shooting distance, and shooting information including f/stop and shutter speed, and if applicable the flash make, model, and type.
Kodachrome
Dwayne's Photo closed out its K-14 service on December 30, 2010. They are the last K-14 service recommended by Kodak, but I have found one other service in the USA that is not discontinuing K-14. Anyone that can identify another good source of K-14 processing anywhere in the world that takes orders from the USA, please contact me.
Why is this so? For one thing, Kodak discontinued Kodachrome in 2009 and is no longer manufacturing or selling it. Kodachrome is still available from some retailers but when this is gone there will be no more. Decreasing processing volumes make processing machines for Kodachrome more and more difficult to keep busy, and the cost of maintenance versus the income brought in has turned this into a losing proposition. Kodachrome processing will continue to be available for a price from those few who can get enough money per roll to keep their business going.
Why can't you process Kodachrome economically in batches of a few rolls, like E-6 and C-41 films? Because of the construction of the Kodachrome emulsion, the very things that gives it the fine grain and image detail that make it desirable and unique, make ordinary processing impossible. The processing steps for K-14 include, but are not limited to
- Chemical softening and removal of the black backing on the film.
- Ordinary development to completion of all three emulsion layers.
- Red light exposure through the back of the film to expose the back layer, which is the red/cyan layer, and development of that layer to completion with a cyan dye coupler.
- Blue light exposure through the front of the film to expose the blue/yellow layer, and development of that layer to completion with a yellow dye coupler.
- Chemical fogging of the remaining green/magenta middle layer and development to completion with a magenta dye coupler.
- Bleach of the silver in all three layers and also in the yellow filter between the top two emulsion layers. The silver is oxidized to a sliver halide, presumably the same one as in unexposed Kodachrome.
- Fixing, the dissolving of the silver halide and its leaching out of the film.
- Washing, to accomplish the removal of fixer and any other residual chemicals from the film.
Obviously, the steps of exposing the film with monochromatic light from each side of the film separately means that you can't process Kodachrome on reels. In particular, the blue light exposure through the front of the film must be done very carefully because this light will fog the green middle layer if it reflects around in the processing area and hits the film on the back side. It's unclear how difficult the red light exposure is to accomplish correctly, other than the obvious need to completely expose the red-sensitive lowest emulsion layer but not to fog either of the other layers, meaning that this red light exposure must lie between some lower and upper limits to do the job with good results in the final product – something that seems impossible to accomplish over the entire film front surface with the film wound on a reel.
Some of the steps are more complicated than they appear, particularly the bleaching step. A chemical called ferrous EDTA is used to accomplish this step efficiently without excessive alkalinity or acidity, and this chemical must be continually aerated to maintain its effectiveness. And, some steps such as "conditioning" have been omitted for brevity. For more detail, see the Wikipedia page on K-14:
Kodachrome Up Through December 30, 2010
The last Kodak-approved processor for Kodachrome film was Dwayne's Photo of Parsons, Kansas. Due to declining volume and the cost of maintaining the mechanized K-14 process that is necessary for processing Kodachrome, they shut down their processing line after processing the last film received as of noon, Central Standard Time (UTC-06) on Thursday, December 30, 2010. This date has been announced for some time and there was no hint of a reprieve, and Dwayne's did not postpone this date.
Dwayne's Photo offers sales and processing of a wide variety of Kodak films of all sizes and formats and will process most other films.
Links:
- Wikipedia article on Kodachrome: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodachrome
- Dwayne's Photo: http://www.dwaynesphoto.com
Processing Kodachrome After December 30, 2010
At a price, Rocky Mountain Film Services still will process Kodachrome with K-14. Their prices as given on their web site on December 23, 2010 is $36.50 per roll plus a per-order shipping and handling charge of $6 (free shipping for 10 or more rolls) plus, for international orders, $3 USD for international shipping. Turnaround is given as one to six months. Their web site is
This may seem steep but that seems to be what it costs to maintain a K-Lab processor and K-14 chemistry, and one to three months may be how long it takes to get together the minimum of 75 rolls that are needed to make a processing run with the machine.
Rocky Mountain Film Services specializes in developing out-of-date film that requires legacy processes, such as E-2, E-3, E-4, C-22, K-10, K-12, etc. and their price structure as well as their turnaround times reflect this business model. We can hope that with the higher volumes that they will inevitably receive of K-14 film since Dwayne's has stopped taking Kodachrome, they will temporarily offer lower prices and faster turnaround from a continuously operating K-14 line – but this won't last if it happens, because Kodak stopped producing Kodachrome in 2009 and there is only so much of it still out there.
LR544 Batteries for Canon A-Series
The Canon A-1 (and I presume the rest of the A series, the AE-1, etc.) used a type 544 6 Volt silver battery. Silver batteries have become unavailable. The type 544 has been replaced by a similar alkaline battery that doesn't last very long in these cameras, but more recently a longer-life lithium battery has emerged. These batteries go by a variety of designations, most often PX28L or LR544, for about $6.50 each; click here for a Amazon listing of a four-pack. These are available in four-packs, five-packs, ten-packs, 24-packs, etc. online; do a search on PX28L or LR544 at your favorite shopping site or do a web search. Please do NOT buy one in a store for $15 or some such and then contact me about it.
Replacements for Mercury Batteries
Many cameras manufactured from about 1965 through 1990 or so used a mercury cell, the PX-13, to power internal CdS light meters and for other uses. This type of battery has the property of maintaining a constant voltage of 1.35 Volts as it discharges until it is nearly dead, which is important in maintaining consistent and accurate light meter readings. Unfortunately the PX-13 and nearly all other mercury batteries have been discontinued. There is a "modern" equivalent to the PX-13, the type 625, and it comes in alkaline and lithium forms – but the voltage is 1.5 Volts, which will require that light meters of most cameras that were designed for the PX-13 be recalibrated.
A battery does exist that uses similar chemistry and that provides accurate light meter readings without recalibraiton. It was designed for hearing aids and needs air to work, so you may or may not need to scratch a notch in a battery cover or otherwise compromise sealing or waterproofing depending on the design of the battery compartment, but this is preferable to modifying a vintage camera for many. This is the Wein PX625/PX13, and you can find them for about $7.60 for one, or $50 for 12 (about $4.17 each), by doing a web search on "Wein PX13" or "Wein PX625." These batteries also maintain their voltage well over their life but they don't have the long life of the older mercury batteries, so keep a spare or two on hand on trips or if you shoot a lot and leave the light meter on with the lens cap off.
An site in the UK has this very interesting page (new tab or window):
http://www.smallbattery.company.org.uk/sbc_mercury_catalogue.htm
Whatever your need is, these guys have a solution. If you need to use legacy cameras in a long-life mission-critical situation they can help you.
Canon's Flash Coupler L
The original Canon F-1 used a flash coupler over the film rewind knob to keep the camera compact while allowing room for a removable pentaprism. The match-needle metering using the built-in center-zone meter is backlit in the viewfinder through a diffusion window in the body beside the pentaprism. Pentaprisms that replaced the in-camera meter, such as the autoexposure and low-light pentaprisms, cover this window, offering a devastatingly simple method of disabling the unused light meter. You don't need a flash when one of these pentaprisms are used because they are sophisticated light meters, but if the occasion arises you can still use the PC synch socket with an off-camera flash or the smaller Flash Coupler D that comes with the camera.
Indoors in dim light, such as at indoor concerts or events where the audience area is not brightly lit, the internal match-needle meter is very dim. Canon's answer to this is the Flash Coupler L, which includes a grain-of-wheat bulb that is turned on with a slider switch and illuminates the diffusion window, making the match-needle metering easily visible in any light, even total darkness, allowing you to take photographs of night events with a long lens.
The Flash Coupler L is powered by two mercury batteries, a PX13 and a PX1. The PX13 powers the pseudo light meter when the Speedlite 133D is used but otherwise isn't used; the PX1 powers the grain-of-wheat bulb that illuminates the diffusion window that provides a backlight for the F-1's match-needle metering.
The PX1 is a very rare bird, and of course is not readily available in mercury anymore. The current designations equivalent to the PX1 are LR50, A1PX, VPX1, and EPX1. I found an offering of six for $22 ($3.67 each) on Amazon here. This battery will last for years if you turn off the little light when you aren't using it. Use the Wein equivalent for the PX13 in the Canon Flash Coupler L, which also will last for years if you don't use a Speedlite 133D a lot.