Kodak to put film prices up in 2012.

Jaf-Photo said:

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Photography truly has mass appeal as a hobby, and I'm sure that many advanced digital shooters would also embrace the fun of shooting and processing film, with a bit of encouragement.

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Wonderful thought although not sure why they would be.

fotch said:

Wonderful thought although not sure why they would be.

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I think so because most people love the look of good analogue photography. Shooting and developing film is also very tactile and encourages a deeper thinking and understanding about photography. It's also something you can practice, improve and master, which is the point of a hobby for many people. They would also be pleasantly suprised by the quality, affordability and durability of vintage lenses and bodies.

The main problem is that a lot of wholly digital photography enhusiasts are not quite aware that film is still readily available or that home development is so easy.

Someone needs to inform them and who better than the people producing and selling film?

Couple of thoughts come to mind...of no particular value of course.

Those that "know how" are, by and large, invested in the present. The guy who doesn't know what he doesn't know is often the guy who will force innovation thanks, ironically, to his ignorance of what is "possible".

I don't blame Kodak for its stumbles. Companies just don't handle a 90% (or whatever it was) drop in revenue over a relatively brief period of time gracefully. Can't be done. No organization is equipped for that. Frankly, I'm amazed they survived at all.

BUT...since I've discovered Portra, I am delighted they are still around!

omaha said:

Those that "know how" are, by and large, invested in the present. The guy who doesn't know what he doesn't know is often the guy who will force innovation thanks, ironically, to his ignorance of what is "possible".

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Blue is a color, but not all colors are blue.

While the above approach always sounds good in theory, the reality is that for every successful "possible" there are hundreds, if not thousands, of crashed-and-burned "impossibles" littering the innovation landscape. Simply following the standard recipe to become a color does not in any way guarantee you will end up blue.

Donkeys fated to push carts up hills understand this reality oh so painfully well...

Ken

omaha said:

I don't blame Kodak for its stumbles. Companies just don't handle a 90% (or whatever it was) drop in revenue over a relatively brief period of time gracefully. Can't be done. No organization is equipped for that. Frankly, I'm amazed they survived at all.

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It can be done. Fuji did it. Fuji knew that digital would not yield the same profits as film and figured out how to survive the transition.

Kodak's stumbles were the fault of Kodak. The decline of film revenue was not a stumble, it was the result of technological change- change they initiated.

Kodak knew the transition was coming for a long time- the first digital camera was invented at Kodak, remember. Kodak management did not manage the transition well, and for the most part failed to successfully capitalize on their innovations in digital technology. Once they had missed the chance to gain a strong position in the market and the money from film wasn't coming in as it had been, then to stay alive they had to sell off technology that should be now bringing substantial returns- like OLED screens and laser digital movie projection.

Those fools in charge (various ones) wanted to kill film in favor of digital at one time. They flubbed digital and film was saving their asses. Now they're out of digital, and film is still a major source of income, at least for a while yet.

It wasn't just Perez. IMO the lot of them in top management for at least the last 20 years couldn't find their asses with both hands and a full length mirror.


This is a new time, though. Kodak Alaris is a new company. May they be more perceptive than their forebears.

You are right the made the transition to digital away from film otherwise how can you explain that they stopped the manufacturing of MP shooting stock one year after the introduction of new series of MP Film. Also you can't compare Fuji which is part of a big company to Kodak who is alone. Fuji had help from the Japanese State, Kodak not. Other than that I agree with your post.

MDR said:

You are right the made the transition to digital away from film otherwise how can you explain that they stopped the manufacturing of MP shooting stock one year after the introduction of new series of MP Film.

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They saw the writing on the wall for MP film when the studios decided to force through the transition to digital projection, and being second to Kodak anyway, it made little sense to fight for a rapidly declining share.

Also you can't compare Fuji which is part of a big company to Kodak who is alone.

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What are you talking about? Fuji is not part of some big company. It is a big company. The Fujifilm group changed to a holding company structure in 2006, called Fujifilm Holdings, but that did not alter Fujifilm Corporation. It is no less "alone" than Kodak.
Kodak was a big company not all that long ago. It had a $30 billion market cap in 1997. Kodak was dominant in the business for most of its existence, with Fuji a perennial second. Kodak was its own supplier of most materials, through its subsidiaries. One of Kodak's biggest mistakes was divesting Eastman Chemical, which is doing very well. EC could have provided much of Kodak's profit in the later years of decline, unless of course Kodak found a way to screw EC up, too.

Fuji had help from the Japanese State, Kodak not.

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I don't know specifically what you are referring to, but taking it at face value, I'll say this: A well-run company does not need help from the government. Still, the Japanese structure is such that the government is very cozy with big companies.
But that is not what enabled Fuji to flourish while Kodak faltered: it was sound management. Neither company expected film to decline so soon or so quickly, but Fuji was far better prepared.

Fujifilm is part of a Keiretsu in this case Mitsui which doesn't mean that they outright own Fuji but that they have major ties to Fujifilm. Fuji didn't kill their print stocks but their shooting stocks first. Kodak had bad management but Fuji did have some advantages over Kodak right from the beginning of the digital revolution.

As Tolstoy said, "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

It is in that sense that I don't fault Kodak for where things are today. Their revenue fell off a cliff. Their market all but disappeared. History provides little reason to expect that companies in such circumstances will handle it gracefully. There are a handful of counter examples of course, but I'd call those situations where "the exception proves the rule".

Surely, well before the digital revolution, Kodak exhibited all the traits of a typical, ossified, inward-looking big corporation. The traits of their corporate culture that proved (nearly) fatal when the digital revolution took hold had surely been causing them to suffer in the market for decades. They had a good thing going, and they milked it well, and then it went away.

What confuses me is the presence of what seems like anger and bitterness directed toward Kodak on the part of film aficionados. I don't see any possibility, really, that even a metaphysically ideal management team/culture at Kodak over the past 30 years would have been able to guide the company to a place where film availability today would be all that different from where it actually is.

Actually, the opposite is may very well be the case. It may very well be that Kodak's "leviathanic" nature kept/keeps film going where a more nimble management team would have bailed out completely years ago. Its hard to imagine a forward looking, unsentimental, nimble management team assessing the situation in the mid to late 1990's and thinking anything other than "we have got to find another business to be in, and fast."

As things stand, I can't help the feeling that, as someone who returned to film in 2013, I've jumped onto a sinking ship. Sad, really. I'm not at all informed on the subtleties of either emulsion design or digital sensor design, but to my eye, the guys who designed film did things that the digital guys haven't yet figured out. There is a quality to the images I am getting from my RB67/Portra/Scan workflow that I never achieved shooting digital (despite endless hours of fiddling in Photoshop with countless plugins and techniques). Film just suits my eye better. I can see the difference. The aesthetic that the digital world has pursued just doesn't work for me. I can't get images like this from digital.



For the moment, I'm pleased that I can still get Portra 160 at what I consider ridiculously cheap prices. If that ever becomes doubtful, I'll buy as much as I can and freeze it. I'm also fortunate to have a local lab (shoutout to Rockbrook Camera here in Omaha) that still does in-house developing and scanning. The fact that they are right off the highway on my drive to work makes it even nicer.

omaha said:

As things stand, I can't help the feeling that, as someone who returned to film in 2013, I've jumped onto a sinking ship.

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To a large extent I can understand how you feel as I get that way too. But I keep reminding myself that with Ilford, are good for the long term. Kodak's future is very perilous and Fujifilm's famed commitment to film seems ephemeral at best.

So for color photography, there still may be many dark days ahead.

Ilford is our one shining star that will keep us going well into the future. Ilford is strong and has clear, demonstrable commitment to film photography.

BLESS Ilford!!

I don't mean to bash Ilford but my favourite films come from Kodak and Fuji.

If film phototographers switch to Ilford films out of fear that Kodak and Fuji will go out of business, that will be a self-fulfilling prophesy.

I will continue to buy and shoot the films I love. If they disappear one day, I will deal with it then.

(FP4 is great, by the way.)

omaha said:

It is in that sense that I don't fault Kodak for where things are today. Their revenue fell off a cliff.

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Never been a fan of the simplified single-root-cause school of failure analysis.

After the NTSB gets the dreaded phone call, what's the first thing the head investigator always says to the assembled media? "The final cause won't be determined for several months, so don't even bother asking us right now." There's a very good reason for that response.

In the past I've encouraged readers to peruse the final report files of the NTSB to really understand why things crash-and-burn. The insight to be gleaned is that there is never an obvious single point of failure. It's always a chain of events that, while possibly triggered by a single failure, cascades through a rapidly escalating chain of events that very quickly becomes uncontrollable. The odds of any one failure in that cascade being fatal are usually remote. It's the cascade itself that proves fatal.

And so it is with Kodak. They didn't crash-and-burn just because "their revenue fell off a cliff." The real world is more complex than that. They crashed-and-burned because the management team hired specifically to negotiate that well-anticipated looming market consequence repeatedly failed, at each link in the accelerating cascade, to successfully do just that. In other words, bad decisions by those being paid to make good decisions.

My oft-repeated favorite example was the media-event-driven public destruction by explosives of film-related infrastructure buildings. Blew them up while all the cameras were rolling, just to prove to Wall Street how much they hated that icky obsolete film stuff, when in fact revenue from the sales of film was still keeping the company afloat. Nice message. It was a particularly egregious link in their fatal cascade.

So the apology that poor Kodak had absolutely nothing to do with their own demise is an affront to both reason and the empirical facts. As is the opinion that there was nothing that anybody at Kodak could have done to negotiate the looming crisis.

Kodak wasn't the only one in a tight spot, you know. But others managed to find a way out. Why is that?

Perhaps we should ask the donkey...

Ken

Ken Nadvornick said:

Never been a fan of the simplified single-root-cause school of failure analysis.

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And so it is with Kodak. They didn't crash-and-burn just because "their revenue fell off a cliff." The real world is more complex than that. They crashed-and-burned because the management team hired specifically to negotiate that well-anticipated looming market consequence repeatedly failed, at each link in the accelerating cascade, to successfully do just that. In other words, bad decisions by those being paid to make good decisions.

My oft-repeated favorite example was the media-event-driven public destruction by explosives of film-related infrastructure buildings. Blew them up while all the cameras were rolling, just to prove to Wall Street how much they hated that icky obsolete film stuff, when in fact revenue from the sales of film was still keeping the company afloat. Nice message. It was a particularly egregious link in their fatal cascade.

So the apology that poor Kodak had absolutely nothing to do with their own demise is an affront to both reason and the empirical facts. As is the opinion that there was nothing that anybody at Kodak could have done to negotiate the looming crisis.

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Indeed. Which is why I wrote:

Surely, well before the digital revolution, Kodak exhibited all the traits of a typical, ossified, inward-looking big corporation. The traits of their corporate culture that proved (nearly) fatal when the digital revolution took hold had surely been causing them to suffer in the market for decades.

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lxdude said:

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It wasn't just Perez. IMO the lot of them in top management for at least the last 20 years couldn't find their asses with both hands and a full length mirror........

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Looks like TMY in 4x5 went up a fair bit, nearly 30%.

http://www.largeformatphotography.i...?111735-Film-prices-(Kodak-TMY-in-particular)

As I just posted over there, HP5+ here I come. I really like Ilford anyway and it looks like they just got my B&W sheet film business.

TMY-2 is a superb film but it just isn't twice as good as HP5+.

Some are willing to pay 300/box for XX, maybe Kodak believes sky is the limit.

miha said:

Some are willing to pay 300/box for XX, maybe Kodak believes sky is the limit.

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Well, I wouldn't pay that regularly... Let's see if the price comes down once they cut the first run of it, and it's not XX, that's "super-XX" what was being cut was Double-X just FYI

Just flipped over to the Kodak Alaris site. Looked through their press releases (here). How come all I see is digital this, digital that, data this, and software that? I can barely even find the word film. I'm really, really trying to remain positive about these guys. But...

Ken

StoneNYC said:

Well, I wouldn't pay that regularly... Let's see if the price comes down once they cut the first run of it, and it's not XX, that's "super-XX" what was being cut was Double-X just FYI

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Well, Super-XX was discontinued by Kodak exactly 20 years ago...

Ken Nadvornick said:

Just flipped over to the Kodak Alaris site. Looked through their press releases (here). How come all I see is digital this, digital that, data this, and software that? I can barely even find the word film. I'm really, really trying to remain positive about these guys. But...

Ken

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I thought Kodak Alaris was a film business???

No!

KPP traded in the Document Imaging as well as the Personal Imaging division from Kodak to form Kodak Alaris.

Even in the Personal Imaging division halide film and paper is just a part.


(In the Document Imaging division microfilm is lacking as that marketing section had been sold by Kodak before.)

miha said:

Well, Super-XX was discontinued by Kodak exactly 20 years ago...

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I'm just saying when I started shortening it to XX cause it looks cooler and easier to type, people who used to use Super-XX kept calling it Super-XX which it's not, so I'm just clarifying. Paying $300 for a pack, you want to at least be buying it knowing what you're getting... Lol

I see. I didn't know XX/double X/Super XX can be confusing to some.

AgX said:

No!

KPP traded in the Document Imaging as well as the Personal Imaging division from Kodak to form Kodak Alaris.

Even in the Personal Imaging division halide film and paper is just a part.


(In the Document Imaging division microfilm is lacking as that marketing section had been sold by Kodak before.)

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Any idea how large the film business is inside of KPP? 10%, 20%? More? Less?