Quote:
Originally Posted by old_tv_nut
Question: how are the blacks in your images? If they are still black and not colored, that indicates staining rather than dye fading.
|
Quite faded toward a weird brown/magenta color.
I too think it would be odd to have a color film with fading in only a single layer, but as you aluded to, Kodachrome is essentially just three black and white emulsions, each sensitive to a different portion of the visible spectrum, and stacked. I can't see quality control being an issue during manufacture; the film is just too simple.
Edit: I actually can think of a QC issue in manufacture that could cause what might LOOK like fading. If one of the three emulsions was mixed improperly, you could end up with a situation in which the record for that layer isn't "contrasty" enough compared to the other two. The processing would then continue normally, but the dye layer for the emulsion with the defect would be "weak" by comparison. The slide would look faded right out of the box, and any subsequent prints (like the Kotavachrome prints) would look the same. Now I wish I could go back to 1953 and see the slides when they were new.
I can see Kodachrome being more likely to have layer-specific QC issues during development than say Ektachrome or Fujichrome with the integral dye couplers.