Re: filmscanners: open and control

[TREVITHO@aol.com]

In a message dated 3/6/01 10:39:50 am, brian.rumary@virgin.net writes:

Dear Brian 

<<But Daquerre's process was a technological dead-end that really had no 
future 
and so there was little call to get round it. It was expensive (it used a 
plate 
coated in metallic silver), it could only be looked at in certain viewing 
conditions, and there was no way to produce copies. Talbot's process negative 
was the one with a future. Anyway the big improvements in photographic 
processes 
happened _after_ Talbot's patents expired in the 1860s; the wet plate 
process, 
dry plates and finally film.>>

Or you could take the view that so many studios were making big money out of 
Daguerrotype portraits that they didn't see that it was a blind alley until 
others had gone the neg/pos route.  Talbot's early patents were challenged by 
alternatives within a couple of years. After unsuccesfully fighting off his 
rivals Fox Talbot concentrated on reproduction processes, which is what he 
seemed to have in mind when he first started his experiments. 

Incidentally Robert Goddard touches on another theory in his novel "Into the 
Light" which has a photographer as the central character. The book is set in 
the present day but flashes back a couple of centuries where a character is 
based on the mysterious Elizabeth Fulhame who wrote an account of 
photographic techniques in 1794. 

<<Agfa's original colour films also needed to be sent back to the lab for 
processing. I think it was Ferania who first produced a home-developing 
colour 
film, and it was Kodak's 'E process' films that first made it popular. Anyway 
the great majority of film users still don't do their own processing; they 
take 
it to a lab. It is only enthusiasts and some professionals who do their own 
processing. The general public are just not interested in mucking about with 
dark rooms and messy chemicals; they just want to point and shoot.>>

Sorry I should have described it as independent labs compared to Kodak owned 
labs. It was Agfa's ideas that gave us the E process, including the colour 
coupler in the film not in the process. 
 
Yours


Bob Croxford
Cornwall
England

www.atmosphere.co.uk