Kodak flash cubes were used in 126 cameras. I still have one camera and one lonely cube here. Yes, they were quite good. Four flashes per cube, pop out and put in another. Every one worked.
PE
PE
It's official, Kodak is selling its film business.
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One of your designs PE? Exploding magnesium?
I had nothing to do with it.
PE
PE
According to this USA Today article, the motion picture film division might be up for sale as well:
"Kodak made a point of saying that businesses, such as consumer inkjet printing, motion picture and television film, and specialty chemicals, are outside of the core. Ken Luskin, president of California wealth management firm Intrinsic Value Asset Management, said the company seems to be indicating that it will also sell those businesses."
http://www.usatoday.com/money/indus...k-sells-still-photography-business/57289302/1
I also got an email from Audrey this evening that states Kodak film and pro paper will be represented at the Kodak booth at Photokina in Germany next month. At that time, they will launch the updated Kodak Professional Film website and brochures. It is expected to take until early to mid next year to finalize the sale of the still film unit.
The key thing to remember here is that Kodak is marketing both Kodak still film and the Kodak still film customer to the potential buyers, so we are all literally in the spotlight together at the moment.
So my feeling is lets not blow the chance we have all been talking about for years to get Kodak film in the hands of an eager new owner that could very well want to keep the products in our hands for longer than we thought possible.
Keep buying it, shooting it and for god's sake, keep the vibe as positive as you can, I am going to.
"Kodak made a point of saying that businesses, such as consumer inkjet printing, motion picture and television film, and specialty chemicals, are outside of the core. Ken Luskin, president of California wealth management firm Intrinsic Value Asset Management, said the company seems to be indicating that it will also sell those businesses."
http://www.usatoday.com/money/indus...k-sells-still-photography-business/57289302/1
I also got an email from Audrey this evening that states Kodak film and pro paper will be represented at the Kodak booth at Photokina in Germany next month. At that time, they will launch the updated Kodak Professional Film website and brochures. It is expected to take until early to mid next year to finalize the sale of the still film unit.
The key thing to remember here is that Kodak is marketing both Kodak still film and the Kodak still film customer to the potential buyers, so we are all literally in the spotlight together at the moment.
So my feeling is lets not blow the chance we have all been talking about for years to get Kodak film in the hands of an eager new owner that could very well want to keep the products in our hands for longer than we thought possible.
Keep buying it, shooting it and for god's sake, keep the vibe as positive as you can, I am going to.
I'll order up a few more boxes of Porta post haste!
This, I think, is important. I'm not a huge volume shooter, but prefer to spend my pennies on yellow box film - just because I love it. Results are entirely predictable, and of perfect quality every time; the films are tough as nails so small mistakes when unloading the wet film from the film reels, or hanging them, usually has no impact on the results at all.
I also agree that perhaps it's best for Kodak film to have someone owning it that is as passionate about the product as the people who work in the Kodak film division, someone who can expand the wonderful fun factor of using film, perhaps to a broader audience.
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Thomas Bertilsson;1386042 I also agree that perhaps it's best for Kodak film to have someone owning it that is as passionate about the product as the people who work in the Kodak film division said:
I could be wrong, but I think color is going to be a tough sell, it has been riding on the coat tails of color motion picture stock for some time now.
After 2015, it is hard to say how that will look. I'd say given the coating complexity, storage requirements, lack of labs and lack of popularity of color over black and white, it stands about a 50/50 chance of being viable 2016 onward...
After 2015, it is hard to say how that will look. I'd say given the coating complexity, storage requirements, lack of labs and lack of popularity of color over black and white, it stands about a 50/50 chance of being viable 2016 onward...
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I think for the right buyer this entire Kodak sell out of film manufacturing could become a great business. Obviously they must know exactly how the development curve for sales has been decreasing during the years, and a new owner that doesn't need to feed 50k employees, could be very flexible and make sure there's always room for profit in the end, no matter how small batches they need in 5, 10, 15, 20.... etc. years...
I think the problem is that the production coating machines that are still in service aren't suited for producing small batches. As I understand it, the smaller, research coating machines that were designed for small batches have been 'decommissioned'. I'm sure PE will have more to say about what coating machines are still left.
Whilst not trivial, it's not rocket science either. Coating machines are not exclusive to film production and could be built to the correct scale.
I suspect that coating is a minor issue compared with consistent manufacture of the emulsion.
Steve.
note: Emphasis added
Therein lies the problem. Yes, new smaller coating machines could be built, but that costs a lot of capital, something that is at a premium in a declining market such as film photography. Not only that, but every new coating machine requires the film "recipe" to be tweaked to ensure consistent results. This tweaking (I assume) must be done in whole batch runs, so there is a lot of waste to R&D before a single square inch of new retail-quality film could be coated.
I also agree that perhaps it's best for Kodak film to have someone owning it that is as passionate about the product as the people who work in the Kodak film division, someone who can expand the wonderful fun factor of using film, perhaps to a broader audience."
I nominate Thomas for advisory board. If I can run marketing. ):
I nominate Thomas for advisory board. If I can run marketing. ):
Perhaps for simple, B&W emulsions, but for more complex color coatings, the coating machine is very much 'part of the equation'. Scaling up or down is not a simple matter.
An example that comes to mind is Disc film. The initial coatings that all the evaluation test used were made on research machines and the sky granularity looked good. Unfortunately, when things were scaled up for the large production coating machines, they were unable to achieve the same low sky granularity until just about the end of Disc film.
Again, I'm sure PE will have more to say.
I think the more scary situation is where Kodak cannot find someone to pay the price they want or they want the buyer to take on certain responsibilities that make it fiscally impossible for the new company to operate at a profit. Kodak then uses the lack of a sale as justification for closing film production. I deal with this occasionally with some of my clients "I want $100 for X" "we are offering $50" "for that price, we are going to throw it out because of the cost and difficulties of transferring X over to you".
I think Steve is right in that it is not rocket science, it is money. Someone has to be willing to spend the hundreds of thousands to build and test the machine - the technology is proven, the science is old-technology but who is willing to spend the money now?
I think Steve is right in that it is not rocket science, it is money. Someone has to be willing to spend the hundreds of thousands to build and test the machine - the technology is proven, the science is old-technology but who is willing to spend the money now?
Well, an emulsion or a film coating can be scaled up or down. We did it regularly from the research 10L scale up to 2 larger scales. In these cases, the formula had to use different mixers and mixer speeds, different methods of delivery, but we know all of that and had models for it. All of the hardware was off-the-shelf.
For coatings, it was a bit harder. If you slowed down the machine or sped it up, you had to change the formula. Sometimes a little and sometimes a log.
It is easier to coat on a more restricted schedule than it is to change speed or batch size.
And, when you do make a change, it requires testing which is expensive.
PE
For coatings, it was a bit harder. If you slowed down the machine or sped it up, you had to change the formula. Sometimes a little and sometimes a log.
It is easier to coat on a more restricted schedule than it is to change speed or batch size.
And, when you do make a change, it requires testing which is expensive.
PE
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PE,
Do you know how the remaining Kodak coating machine compares in size with those at Inoviscoat and at China Lucky which are apparently running now mainly on non silver halide coating?
Is there a market for non silver halide coating in the US?
Thanks.
Do you know how the remaining Kodak coating machine compares in size with those at Inoviscoat and at China Lucky which are apparently running now mainly on non silver halide coating?
Is there a market for non silver halide coating in the US?
Thanks.
This thread is filled with so romanticism of Kodak, irrational opinions, and irrational love for a particular medium that I wonder what happened to their alleged love for photographic pictures, if they even ever had that love. Reading this thread is laughable, and one wonders if the same person wrote all these postings in some illicit weird desire to make good comedy.
Well, it worked!
Well, it worked!
If you replace Kodak with oil paint and photographic pictures with just pictures, what changes? Is it still good comedy?
Sorry, I own DSLR and have used many digital cameras with good results, but it just isn't the same thing. It isn't the same workflow and the result is different. What is so irrational about it? The medium can be one part of the art. The feeling it delivers.
Sure, you can use some flashy plugin to turn your digital photos to "oil paintings". Still some people want to buy real oil paintings. Why? Why does that matter to some people? Are they also just irrational, incapable of seeing the picture behind the medium?
IDK, Probably the Rochester machine is larger, but the one in Colorado was about 1.5x the width of the Rochester machine.
IDK. Probably very little at that thickness.
PE
Well, somebody has to, otherwise they'd starve and wouldn't that just be cruel?
You miss my point. The irrationality I wrote of earlier was not the love of photography, or even film, but rather the love of Kodak specifically, and the thinking that the death of Kodak would be the death of photography in general.
As to your using oils and paintings as a parallism, it does not apply because there are many companies that make the oil paints, not just one.
I realize nobody can give the look of specific Kodak films, but if there is a will, there is a way to use another film, tweek the development, the printing processes. Films can come and go, but it should be the photography that will stay with us, through whatever products, chemicals, etc that are available today.
A true lover of art, should not care so much who made the "paint"....the pictures (photographs) should be the focus.
It does not look like God chasing that kitten!
PE
PE
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