Kodak To Bring Back EKTACHROME Film

Film fans have got a little bit excited this week as over at CES in Las Vegas, Kodak has announced that they're bringing KODAK EKTACHROME Film back to life.

Kodak will be working on bringing the old film back to the market over the next 12 months with hopes that the first batch will be available for purchase at the end of 2017. 

KODAK EKTACHROME Film was discontinued in 2012 and was a popular choice for generations of cinematographers because of its extremely fine grain, clean colours, tones and contrasts.

“It is such a privilege to reintroduce KODAK EKTRACHROME Film to the cinematography community,” said Steven Overman, Kodak’s chief marketing officer and president of the Consumer and Film Division. “We are seeing a broad resurgence of excitement about capturing images on film. Kodak is committed to continuing to manufacture film as an irreplaceable medium for image creators to capture their artistic vision. We are proud to help bring back this classic.”

Kodak will produce EKTACHROME at its film factory in Rochester, N.Y., and will market and distribute the Super 8 motion picture film version of EKTACHROME Film directly.

Kodak Alaris, an independent company since 2013, also plans to offer a still format KODAK PROFESSIONAL EKTACHROME Film for photographers in 135-36x format.  KODAK PROFESSIONAL EKTACHROME Film is a colour positive film, also known as “reversal,” “slide,” or “transparency” film. Unlike all of the other KODAK PROFESSIONAL Films available today, which are colour negative films, EKTACHROME generates a positive image that can be viewed or projected once it is exposed and processed. This makes it ideal for high-resolution projection or presentations. It is also well suited for scanning and printing onto a range of professional-grade photographic media.  Availability is expected in the fourth quarter of 2017.

Visitors to the Kodak stand at CES also got the chance to get hands-on with the recently announced Kodak Ekta smartphone which is a 21MP camera phone designed for photographers. It features manual controls and numerous shooting modes along with a custom built camera interface and application suite.