FilmNeverDie announces compact film processor

Australian professional lab FilmNeverDie is going forward with plans to make and distribute a film processor, despite a Kickstarter plan that went unfulfilled. The Compact Processor 800 (CP800), built by the company’s Malaysia location, is a rotary processor compatible with Paterson, AP and JOBO 1500 reels. The processor has the capacity for eight 135- or four 120-format film rolls.

The project has since moved to Open Source Initiative, dubbed Farbung [meaning ‘colouring’ in German] and released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. This allows the community access to source code and freedom to build their own, on top of ensuring the best possible iteration for all future customers.

“CP800 has come such long way—evolving from a tangle of wires into a fully packaged automated rotary drum film processor,” says Gary Wong, co-founder, FilmNeverDie. “It’s the backbone of black and white processing at FilmNeverDie We’re hoping CP800 will help the startup labs find their feet. Processing equipment is becoming increasingly difficult to find, operate and maintain.”

Look for an interview with Gary Wong on an upcoming episode of the Dead Pixels Society podcast.