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Comment by bambax | Hacker News Reader

Amazing and extraordinary project.

The cost comparison doesn't feel perfectly genuine, because it considers development _and scanning_ of 8mm has to be done in a laboratory while it can be done at home for 35mm.

Regarding scanning, the author spent an inordinate amount of time building this amazing device than can scan as well as shoot; but he obviously could have built instead a machine to scan 8mm film. Even without it, it's fairly easy to transform 8mm film into digital at home; there are many tools to do this.

Regarding film development, I'm not familiar with 8mm specific requirements, but if the author is able to develop color 35mm film, which is not that easy in my experience, he should be more than able to develop at least B&W 8mm film?

Not to belittle this incredible project though!

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The home-developed Kodak Gold looks a lot worse than what you’d get from a lab though. It sure has it’s very unique style this way and might even be a deliberate choice, but that film is popular for it’s nice and warm color rendering, not for producing so many false color artifacts.

Weird, c41 is an extremely standardized process. Developing times, temperatures, results etc. are very consistent. I get the exact same results by developing it at home than when I get it done at a lab. B&W is a lot more subjective and most labs will charge you more to develop it because it has more variables and can't be as easily automated.

Scanning and color reversal is where you'll probably see a difference for color negatives, but development, if done properly, should be very similar.

How tight do you have to hold bath temperatures? I haven't developed C41 at home but have done B&W, and reading about home C41 I remember that it seemed trickier to get right.

A sous vide device makes it easy to hold a water bath at a precise enough temperature that I get C41 results at home that are indistinguishable from my local lab, at least to my eyes.

I use a sous-vide circulator to get the products ~1F above the recommended 102F for the shortest possible development time (3.5min) and never had any problems! The kit I use (cinestill) is a 2-bath process (Developer, and Blix) and not accounting for the time to get the products to 103F, developing a roll of C41 film takes less time than B&W and gives me more consistent results.

Ah that makes sense. I was doing B&W with basically a kettle and a glass thermometer, I had no electronic temperature control equipment. I think I would have found it extremely challenging to do C41 consistently without that.

I'm thinking that some of this may be failure to compensate for the yellowish-to-reddish filter layer that's built into most classic color negative films to account for being printed with incandescent/halogen lamps. If that's ignored, the final image is going to come out blueish to cyanish.

Yup, that's very possible; when I do manual color inversion I usually fill a layer with the film base color, and use the "subtract" blend mode to account for it, else I get much "cooler" colors not unlike what is shown in the demo movie.

That was my first thought too, Kodak Gold is not supposed to look this bad. Converting color negatives is actually quite hard. You can get good results with software such as Negative Lab Pro (Adobe Lightroom plugin), but getting anywhere close to the quality that you get with a lab scanner (usually 20 years old Fuji Frontiers or Noritsu scanners) takes some serious skills. Also, when digitizing film with an DSLR, the light source is very important and has a huge effect on the colors

> Regarding film development, I'm not familiar with 8mm specific requirements, but if the author is able to develop color 35mm film, which is not that easy in my experience, he should be more than able to develop at least B&W 8mm film?

8mm/Super 8 film cartridges are not entirely easy to open, and you pretty much have to destroy them to get the film out. It's also difficult to find film reels that fit them by width, plus 50 feet of film length. They were never intended to be developed at home, but always in a machine (and exclusively by Kodak).

I don't remember Super 8 being available in negative emulsions either, it was always chrome/slide/transparency since you'd project the original film.

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