Kodacolor Slides

[DennisM]

Years ago I recorded our son’s growth with B&W and color negatives as well as slides. I had my color negative and slide film processed by Kodak. Back then I began assembling a slide record of our son’s growth. After learning that Kodak could produce slides from color negatives, I had slides made from selected color negatives to enable a continuous record in slide form. I was very pleased with the resulting “Kodacolor Slides.” In many cases, they looked “better” to my eye than the color prints. I find decades later that the slides have aged well; colors are “accurate” and “true” for want of better terms: they look as they did when I first viewed them. However, I find when I scan my, by now, decades old color negatives that while colors are “accurate” some background areas have blotches that I can remove in Lightroom. I filed my color negatives in their original orange sleeves before refiling them in archival pages about a decade or so ago. Perhaps exposure to the paper sleeves cased some deterioration? Alas my Kodak slide projector is gathering dust and I abandoned my slide project years ago. Recent scans of several Kodacolor Slides are excellent (Epson V600) prior to any correction in Lightroom. With that lead-in, does anyone know what film Kodak used to produce these “Kodacolor Slides?” Is this “service” still performed by independent labs today?

 

[DownUnder]

I too discovered Kodacolor slides in the 1980s. Most photographers didn't know about those back then.

And I still have hundreds of them, in the iconic yellow Kodak slide boxes of that period.

My purpose was to get saleable slides for stock photos from color negative images I had done in my Asia travels. Also some older (1970-1982) images of the Australian bush taken in my early wanderings around the continent, in places where most tourists did not go to back then.

Mine were processed by Kodak Australasia in Preston, Victoria. Ultimately when I finally got around to projecting them, I found they were not quite sharp enough or the colors were slightly 'off' and I gave up on the process.

I do agree with the OP that the slides were far better than the color prints of that time. Almost all of which had off-putting colors (most photographers wouldn't have noticed this) and have largely faded now. Sadly, almost all the photo albums from family and friends have all suffered from image fading, Oddly, prints made by Kodak from my slides are 95%+ as good as they were when I had them made, and many are 50 years old.

Recently I checked my Kodacolor slides. There was some color fading (easily correctable in post processing) but on the whole they have lasted well. As have all the films, color neg or slides, I had processed by Kodak. Not so the Ektachrome, Agfachrome and Fujichrome I had done by custom labs in SE Asia in the 1990s, most have faded badly, still salvageable but mostly as B&W images as the colors are now too far gone and I haven't that much time left in my life for endless hours of finding with post processing software.

Nothing in this world is perfect, and for all that I've always thought Kodak color slides from negatives was a good idea in its day.

 

[santino]

Kodachrome was perfect 😉

 

[Freakscene]

I made hundreds of thousands of Kodacolor slides with a process camera. They looked really nice, and, if the exposure was good, the tonal range was tremendous.

@DennisM, your print film may be blotchy for a range of reasons. Minilabs used stabilization fixer and short wash times, and often didn’t produce negatives with archival stability. It is possible that the sleeves are nor archival. If they are stored folded rather than flat with an opaque sheet between them, textures from one negative often appear in even tones areas in adjacent negatives. I think the changes that occur with age occur unevenly if the texture and opacity they are near is uneven. Maybe the storage that they are in is releasing some gases from plastics, paint or glues that react with the image. Archival storage is subject to a lot of variables.