Fujifilm is investing in increased instax film production

[Henning Serger]

Just FYI:

Fujifilm Invests $30M to Boost Instax Film Production by 20%

The increased production will peak starting in 2025.

petapixel.com

And some background info by me:
The boom in instax film demand has been really huge - permanent growth since 2004 !! For 19 years. That is really outstanding and unique not only in the photography market, but generally in economic history.
Nevertheless if I look at the current market - even calculating future growth - it is very unlikely that it is so huge that it is surpassing the max. coating capacity of the Fujifilm coating machine. The coating machines of Fujifilm, Kodak, Ilford, Foma, Inovisproject (daughter of Polaroid producing the CN film base) are so big that max. production capacity in shift-operation is many, many times the current market volume.
Therefore I have severe doubts that Fujifilm has currently a bottleneck in coating capacity. The bottleneck is most probably the finishing/confectioning capacity which must be increased.
The finishing of instax films is indeed running at full capacity in 3-shift (24/7 operation) for quite some time now (several years). Fujifilm has indeed reached a limit here and must invest further in significantly increased capacities.

Best regards,
Henning

 

[Prest_400]

This is outstanding news. Gives some background at least on what is Fuji doing in the film/analog front, and at least a bit of data to infer on what is going on for the non instant films.
Beautiful to read honestly, specially ironical when the clock began to tick 20 years ago towards digital and instant was to be the one type of product deemed obsolete and irrelevant... Indeed so for peelapart unfortunately, yet here we are for integral films. Related to this, Polaroid released a new high end i type camera.

 

[analogwisdom]

Just FYI:

Fujifilm Invests $30M to Boost Instax Film Production by 20%

The increased production will peak starting in 2025.

petapixel.com

And some background info by me:
The boom in instax film demand has been really huge - permanent growth since 2004 !! For 19 years. That is really outstanding and unique not only in the photography market, but generally in economic history.
Nevertheless if I look at the current market - even calculating future growth - it is very unlikely that it is so huge that it is surpassing the max. coating capacity of the Fujifilm coating machine. The coating machines of Fujifilm, Kodak, Ilford, Foma, Inovisproject (daughter of Polaroid producing the CN film base) are so big that max. production capacity in shift-operation is many, many times the current market volume.
Therefore I have severe doubts that Fujifilm has currently a bottleneck in coating capacity. The bottleneck is most probably the finishing/confectioning capacity which must be increased.
The finishing of instax films is indeed running at full capacity in 3-shift (24/7 operation) for quite some time now (several years). Fujifilm has indeed reached a limit here and must invest further in significantly increased capacities.

Best regards,
Henning

Thanks for the info, Henning. It's good to see continued investment in any kind of film production. With the release of the I-2 by Polaroid, it has me longing even more for Fuji to release a proper camera for Instax Wide, but I am not holding my breath at all for that.

 

[GarageBoy]

Come on Fuji, expand your camera line a little bit. Give us a decent square and wide camera with AF and AE.