closest film to Kodachrome

[nickrapak]

Velvia 50 as a substitute? No way. That's a special-effects film in my book. I liked E100GX (discontinued), I presume E100G with an 81A filter is pretty similar.

Actually, the closest to E100GX in my opinion is Elite Chrome 100. It is in between E100G and E100GX in color balance, with a lean toward the warmer side.

[tiberiustibz]

Given a good scan, one can get Ektar 100 to look more than a little like Kodachrome.

Or a good analog print. Ektar looks really, really good printed the old fashioned way. I haven't yet had a problem with skin tones even though it's not a portrait film. I have shot only a few rolls of K64 (when I can shoot four rolls of Ektar for every roll of K64...) but I can agree that Ektar renders colors well without overdoing them and particularly likes the reds. Today it's harder to find a bad film than it is a good one. I was particularly impressed with the grain. I enlarged a 35mm negative to 16x20 and it looks like my 4x5s.

[Janos]

Kodachrome was always the finest grain, sharpest tranny film, because it was thinner. Essentially a black and white film, was made without any colour dies, only filter layers and silver layer- dyes were added at processing stage, with correct dyes migrating to the filtered layers. This process had something like 14 steps, with absolute control required, hence only Kodak and a handful of others could successfully process it. I stepped in during the changeover from E-4 to E-6. This was a great improvement in small lab processing, but until Velvia, no E-6 film could match the fine grain of Kodachrome.
Presumably this was made possible by the relatively recent improvements in grain technology. I've not tried the Rollei, or some of the other new ones, but with so much difference in the actual structure of the film, it's hard to imagine ever getting close.
(Also, Fuji were the first to achieve consistency from batch to batch,- a revelation in the eighties, especially with colour print paper).

[PKM-25]

I'm with StorminMatt, my last roll of Kodachrome 64 was on a gray cloudly day, and the slides were just dreary, worse than reality.

I am shooting at least 2-3 rolls a day on the average now and I am seeing flat light do in all three of the films rather than the particular speed in use. If there is one thing I have learned in photography is that local light, not overall spectral, plays much more of a role in the final image, not the weather. For example, I see flat as heck images coming out of Kodachrome 25 and 200 if the local light quality is poor. But if it is a dreay Oregon day and I am in a trench of buildings that have different colors, then it brings life to the film.

I have absolutely no problem using KR64 on a dreay day, I just select my subject carefully.