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Comment by thanatropism | Hacker News Reader

The unsaid detail is tha the he’s using E36 (slide; positive image) stock.

I don’t understand why the C41 (negative) process/product became default for consumer grade color photography. I know there’s professional negative film that’s tuned for the human skin. But as an amateur that happened to snag a lot of really high quality (mostly 135) film in bulk on eBay, I’ve always felt overall happier with my legible developed film, the highly contrasted and colorful images and the noticeable flavor of different product lines.

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> I don’t understand why the C41 (negative) process/product became default for consumer grade color photography.

Much better dynamic range, which means you can throw a c41 roll in any camera with an half working meter and you'll get an usable picture. Over or under expose a slide by 1 stop and you're already asking for troubles.

Negatives are also much easier to scan than positives, and possibly easier to print but I'm not very familiar with that.

This. I love shooting E6 slide film for landscapes, but it is very unforgiving if the exposure is even slightly off.

>possibly easier to print but I'm not very familiar with that.

As of now they're pretty much the only way to dark-room print from color film as there is no more paper or chemicals for color-positive prints being made anymore. There used to be Cibachrome/Ilfochrome which was apparently highly regarded, but production of that ended a couple years ago.

Apparently there's a way to reversal process regular RA-4 color paper, but I never tried it. Essentially you expose your paper, then process it in black&white chemistry. After that you wash the paper and expose it again with white light. You then process the paper in RA-4 color chemistry. What's kinda cool about the second processing is that you can do it in the light.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ry6ycSgT8g8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNjLzzH438E

Tetenal Colortec has a product for E6. Their C41 chemistry was very smelly at 100F but it worked first time in my kitchen sink. Their E6 kit might be worth a try:

Random link: <$3 a roll...

https://www.freestylephoto.biz/102036-Tetenal-Colortec-E-6-D...

I was talking about paper chemistry for dark room printing from positive film. There’s still plenty of e6 kits available.

Thanks, my bad. I was clearly overwhelmed with excitement about E6 and C41 at home to properly read your comment :)

The full frame photo the author has posted seems to say Kodak Ektar 100, that is a C41 stock.

The Provia is slide (E6), though.

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