Kodak Kodachrome II

Kodachrome II arrived in 1961 as Kodak's response to a decade of complaints that the original Kodachrome was too slow and too soft. The new emulsion shifted from ASA 10 to ASA 25 in daylight, with a Type A version balanced for 3400K photoflood lamps at ASA 40. Sharpness improved noticeably. Grain dropped. The dyes were reformulated for what Kodak called more accurate color, which mostly meant warmer reds and cleaner skin tones than the original.

The process was K-12, run in Kodak's own labs and a handful of licensed houses. You shipped the film and waited. There was no home development path; the dye couplers were added during processing rather than coated into the film, and that is the reason Kodachrome held color stability for fifty-plus years where E-6 transparencies fade. The trade-off was you never controlled processing yourself.

Kodachrome II ran from 1961 to 1974, when Kodak transitioned to K-14 chemistry and rebranded the same speed point as Kodachrome 25. The K-12 emulsion sits between the original 1936 Kodachrome and the K-14 stocks Steve McCurry and most working National Geographic photographers used through the eighties. McCurry shot the famous Afghan girl portrait on Kodachrome 64, the descendant of Kodachrome-X, but the family lineage starts here.

Format support was wide for its day: 35mm, 828, 16mm, 8mm, with Super 8 added in 1965. None of those formats survive as new product. K-12 chemistry is gone, so any surviving roll either gets processed as black and white in Caffenol or sits as a collector item. Color processing has not been available since the late seventies.

The reciprocity exponent is 1.10, generous compared to E-6 slide films of the same era. Zone Light Meter applies the correction past one second. A 30-second meter reading lands at roughly 35 seconds at the negative. For Kodachrome II that math is mostly academic now: the film has been out of stock for half a century and the few rolls that turn up cannot be processed in color anymore.