Ektachrome has a distinctive look that became familiar to many readers of National Geographic, which used it extensively for color photographs for decades in settings where Kodachrome was too slow.
By contrast, small professional labs have been able to process Ektachrome on-site since the 1950s, with product safety and effluent discharge having been drastically improved since the 1970s, when Kodak reformulated their entire color chemistry lineup.
There were also Kodak processing laboratories in other locations, including Chicago, (Illinois), Hollywood, (California-H), Atlanta (Georgia), Findlay (Ohio), Toronto (Canada) and Hemel Hempstead (England).
On January 5, 2017, Kodak Alaris announced that Ektachrome would return[22] in both ISO 100 35 mm still frame and Super 8 motion picture formats, before the end of the year.
[26] On June 1, 2019, Kodak Alaris announced a wide coating trial of Ektachrome in 120 format for the end of July.
[28] This project reached completion when, on December 10, 2019, Kodak Alaris announced the availability of Ektachrome E100 in a 120-format 5-roll propack and a 4 × 5 box of 10 sheets.
[29] Ektachrome has occasionally been used as a motion picture film stock, particularly for TV news gathering in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
[30] It has been featured in three 1990s and 2000s productions, none of which showed a genuine portrayal of the high technical standards of then-modern Ektachrome: Unlike the above films, one professional motion picture that shows the genuine properties and high standards of 1990s and 2000s Ektachrome was Oliver Stone's World Trade Center (2006).
In that film, Lee specifically used Ektachrome in Super 8mm to simulate the footages captured by the actor Norman Lewis.
[44] For the second season of the American TV series Euphoria released in 2022, Kodak revived the 35 mm motion picture format of Ektachrome at the request of the filmmakers.