My Letter from Ilford chairman

[Photo Engineer]

This is addressed to the photo community in general, and to Photo Mechanic in general.

Namely, if SW FB "AZO" printing papers are relative easy to produce, why is it that no major photographic supplier - Illford, J&C, Kentmere, or Calumet - has seized the opportunity to produce a silver chloride "AZO" type of printing paper? Indeed, given that contact printing papers can be used by all manner of photogrpahers and related artists; what financial or govermental "interests" would prefer - and are able to cause - contact printing to become extinct?

Regards,

Flauvius

This was well answered in another post, but I'll add my comment as well.

The market for Azo paper and, in fact, all contact papers is so small that Kodak was able to supply it with one small run of Azo each year. That is compared to round the clock operations on several machines 24/7/365 for color paper at several plants for a comparison.

There is no possible comparison between the magnitude of the market when you consider this and the fact that the Azo they made was partly unsold as it was, because the market was smaller than one run and so the rest went to waste sometimes.

Michael and Paula have posted their efforts to continue the Azo legacy and I applaud them for that. I hope that their efforts bear fruit. But, no one is going to get rich on making a contact paper.

The evidence for the size of the market is the large variety of contact papers out there and all of the companies rushing to produce more and more SW FB Baryta papers. ~remove tongue from cheek~

BTW, you hire a mechanic to fix your car, you hire an engineer to design one. Even though an engineer can fix a car, there is a big difference between the two. ~insert smiley of choice here~

PE

 

[skillian]

Kodak did not make one small production run of Azo per year. They made master rolls once every 4-5 years and did not produce more until they sold through.

 

[Photo Engineer]

Kodak did not make one small production run of Azo per year. They made master rolls once every 4-5 years and did not produce more until they sold through.

Well, since there was more than one grade of Azo paper, and it was not entirely produced in Rochtser and etc., the picture is even more complex than either of us state, but the gist of it is that on average we are both essentially right.

Sometimes a batch was not sold entirely and even worse, some didn't turn out very well as we are all aware. And I think that both of us would agree that for EK, one small production run is one master roll and depending on demand that run based on what either of us recollect, could vary in timing and even in size.

BTW, have you ever seen wet SW FB paper tear on a coating machine? At coating speeds? Sometimes it is best to just clean the machine, re-thread it and go on to the next job rather than try to finish up the master roll that just tore, while making a minor product. Sometimes you take what you can get!

PE

 

[ajuk]

They say they forcast 20% decline this year, so I wonder if the loss of Agfa and Kodak paper has revesed this?

But TBH I hope Kodak don't pull out of B&W film. I think Fuji made a positive proccessing paper (like Ilfochrome) until last year and they pulled that, but nobody is expecting them to pull out of slide film.

 

[roteague]

I think Fuji made a positive proccessing paper (like Ilfochrome) until last year and they pulled that, but nobody is expecting them to pull out of slide film.

Fuji still produces two papers designed for making prints directly from transparencies: Fujichrome Type 35 and Type 35 Supergloss - both are in limited availabilities (whatever that means) though.

 

[Photo Engineer]

They say they forcast 20% decline this year, so I wonder if the loss of Agfa and Kodak paper has revesed this?

But TBH I hope Kodak don't pull out of B&W film. I think Fuji made a positive proccessing paper (like Ilfochrome) until last year and they pulled that, but nobody is expecting them to pull out of slide film.

Ajuk, the overall decline in B&W film and paper has been nothing short of catastrophic and much larger than anyone at any of the companies had predicted. The people here on APUG must come to a realization of this fact.

This is what led to Agfa's problems and Kodak's exit from the market.

PE

 

[gbroadbridge]

The silly thing is, a well planned advertising campaign could well make a difference.

There is obviously a market for B&W as is shown by B&W C41 pocessed film. Someone smart just needs to push the retro look and feel of true silver based B&W and the current generation would leap in to be using the latest retro thing.

Visualize this:

SCENE: Early Morning. Big night the night before. Tom and Mick meet for Latte to discuss their conquests.

TOM PULLS OUT HIS BLUEBERRY

Tom: Where where are the photos from last night?

Mick: Being processed

Tom: What?

VISUAL: MICK looks astonished at TOMS faux pas


VO: Eastman Kodak B&W film: real, long life, photographs dont just pop out of a printer.


Duh.


Graham.

 

[Photo Engineer]

Graham, first, I agree with all that you say. Envision this though.

The market for most B&W products was in Asia, SA and Africa.

A sudden economic growth there catapulted them from traditional B&W film and prints either to color or directly to D*****L crap. This cut the legs off every B&W manufacturer in the world.

The bulk of the B&W market in the EU, US and Australia was people just like us here on APUG and PN and some of the other higher end very small niche markets. They are tiny when compared to the bulk market EXPECTED in Asia, SA and Africa, and when it began vanishing, our markets in the EU, US and OZ could no longer sustain any sales for all companies.

Agfa sank, Kodak left paper, and well, there you have it. Lets be thankful that Ilford, Kentmere and Bergger to name a few were able to stay afloat.

PE

 

[edz]

Agfa sank, Kodak left paper, and well, there you have it.

Come'on. That's silly. If there is anything you should have learned at EK is that B&W film production and paper is, in the big picture, peanuts. The point of coating facillities (very very large football field sized machines) is to cover a whole class of needs for micro-coating. Agfa L6, for example, only ran film twice a year. The rest of the time (other than the few weeks each year it got shut down for major maintainance) it had non B&W functions. That's really the problem: to produce the quality (and batch to batch consistency) of films we have become accustomed to one needs machines that are larger than large. These "larger than large" machines are expensive to operate and expensive to maintain, The future of B&W is not related really to the market as much as it is to the future of these coating plants. They, however, can be used within the production of highend ink-jet paper to specialized film for LCD panels (a group of former Agfa engineers have raised some venture capital to pursue this line) to a range of thinnest film crystal-based applications (hot stuff in the dawning "nanno" revolution).
What hit Agfa was plain simple: massive mismanagement, piles of incompetance, shortness of vision and a big heaping of comtemporary greed. When they ejected the consumer imaging unit into AgfaPhoto they make matters worse and effectively signed the death certificate. Internal bureaucracy, long a sickness of Agfa, dramtically increased. Billing (its a simple rule that one needs to be able to charge for products and services and the center of that activity is "billing") became a monster (Agfa to AgfaPhoto to Agfa with a bunch of oddball transfers as parts of AgfaPhoto belonged to Agfa and ...) and the money? A for verArschung. 300 mil in old gear and hardly any cash. And to a company headed by Hartmut Emans with a track record of one ruin sucked dry after the next (and a bunch of faud lawsuits by the European Commission which they will probably all lose due their own failings). AgfaPhoto was thrown overboard by a bunch or arrogant accountants without a rubber boat (not even a crude lifesaver) and with its arms and legs tied together.... and into waters infested with sharks like Emans (who, I think, worked earlier in his carrier at Agfa so he may indeed just be the well paid fall guy and not the big-bad wolf). Needless to say, even the best swimmer would sink.

 

[gbroadbridge]

No offense edz, but next time can you split that into paragraphs?

That was really difficult to read and although I'd like to reply it is too much work.

Thanks
Graham.

 

[ajuk]

Ajuk, the overall decline in B&W film and paper has been nothing short of catastrophic and much larger than anyone at any of the companies had predicted. The people here on APUG must come to a realization of this fact.

This is what led to Agfa's problems and Kodak's exit from the market.

PE

ok but that doesn't answer my question.

The silly thing is, a well planned advertising campaign could well make a difference.

There is obviously a market for B&W as is shown by B&W C41 pocessed film. Someone smart just needs to push the retro look and feel of true silver based B&W and the current generation would leap in to be using the latest retro thing.

Visualize this:.........

I am a marketing student
Its bizzarre they seem to have given up on marketing film with seems odd, concidering its there bread and butter.
Not sure about that if it was a TV advert you were trying to invent, but its never gona happen, but adverts in photo magazines would be a good idea. Maybe Ilford could try it if they can aford it.

Reading those long posts and this thread is getting interesting.

I had a discussion last week with someone living in Rochester who is in a position to be extremely well informed about the state of things. He is convinced it is a matter of a few years if not months before silver paper is going to be gone. His reasoning is that apparently every paper manufacturer buys their baryta paper base from the same factory in Germany (schoeller), and that they are down to one line staying busy only a few days per month. If Schoeller decides to close this production line, bam!, no more paper, because no one will have the stock on which to coat their gelatin emulsions. Now, someone could always just coat on something like a COT320 or similar stock, but it will not have the same hard baryta 'look' that we have become accustomed to associating with silver gelatin printing. I hope he is wrong, but I have this uncomfortable feeling that the days of factory made silver gelatin paper are numbered. Thank goodness Hollywood still uses film as their distribution medium. That should keep film technology alive a little longer - I hope.

Not only would the upset a few people here it would also be a disarster, there are still alot of pros mainly using a Medium and Largeformat cameras, a lot of MF photographers are still using film, and as for LF you can forget about it all they can get digital is a scanner or use a MF back, They could scan but many using B&W don't.
It would also have a major inpact on educational institutes I was looking at the HND photography for the 06-07 year and they al included "darkroom practise"

I would be suprised if it was one line making the paper for the whole world, because dispite the decline, you only have to look in a college or a B&W magazine to see there are plenty of people using it.

 

[Photo Engineer]

Some quick responses.

1. Ajuk, the overall decline in B&W was projected to be larger than the 20% or so quoted above, and turned out to be far larger than that pessimistic figure by a big margin. I hope this helps a bit.

2. Ed, Kodak and other companies have smaller coating machines. I routinely coated paper on 10" machines in KRL and the footage could approach production lengths. Quality was as good as production. Emulsion formulas with good quality existed at all scales and could be manufactured at many coating widths and lengths. But the labor for each machine would remain about the same, so labor costs would go up as scale went down. This was a significant problem to consider. In addition, the exact formulation would have to be adjusted for the scale and that would have cost a bit up front. The downturn dictated that EK couldn't do that in an economical fashion (good management decision?)

So, while I agree with you in principle, I have to add that too many 'film' companies bit the dust at the same time to be a coincidence. Mismanagement did contribute by amplifying the market downturn. The market downturn did its thing as well.

I really think that we are all like blind men feeling an elephant and describing it from different perspectives. Maybe the story below might help a bit to lighten things.

There once was a woman who had never seen an elephant before. One had escaped from the circus and wandered into her garden and was eating cabbages. She called the police and reported "There is this strange grey creature in my garden pulling up cabbages with his tail, and you would never bellieve where he is sticking them!"

Well, that is where we all are until the real story comes to light.

PE

 

[ajuk]

Some quick responses.

1. Ajuk, the overall decline in B&W was projected to be larger than the 20% or so quoted above, and turned out to be far larger than that pessimistic figure by a big margin. I hope this helps a bit.

WOW Was that figure from feb when the buyout went ahead? I do think they (by they I don't just mean Ilford) need to market the stuff, where did you get that info from?

 

[Photo Engineer]

Ajuk, from Antonio Perez personally. I am not free to quote acutal fitures. Sorry. See previous posts in this thread.

PE

 

[modafoto]

Support Ilford.

I do! Film and paper is from Ilford from now on...developer is from Agfa (SURPRISE).

 

[Matt5791]

edz has some very good points.

The photograpic industry has for a long time (well, since its inception infact) had no other competition in the form of other technologies. To add to this the market has been dominated by a few major players for years and years.

As has happened before, in many other industries, change suddenly occours.

Now these operators need the best management and production available to compete - but they don't have it because over the years they have been apathetic, not driving the business forward and, as the famous British businessman John Harvey-Jones once put it, they have been putting a "lot of effort into maintaining the status quo" leaving themselves wide open to attack.

It seems that Kodak probably falls into this category. Now there seems to be a company quite obviously run by a team of accountants - notice how the price of Kodak products keeps going up and up and up. A classic scenario, trading on brand alone. It just wont cut it when there are many many other good companies selling products of comparable quality, and appeal, for a cheaper price (and I'm not talking about traditional film products here). The fact that this is happening is evidence too of their own arrogant belief in the value of their brand.

Everyone knows you can't maintain this in todays market for any product - look at the appalling mess Mercedes Benz find themselves in having, in the last few years relied disproportionatly on their brand.

I actually wonder if Kodak will be around in its current form, or even at all, in a few years time. Be ready for an announcement like "Kodak sells film manufacturing wing to Chinese"

I just want to go into the boardroom and bang their heads together!

Matt

 

[Photo Engineer]

Matt, there are a lot of good points being made here. Never forget the fact that the people at the head of all of these companies are 'just people' though. They make mistakes just like we do.

One of yours is to say prices are going up and up and up. I can remember how expensive a roll of color film or a box of color paper was back in the 50s. One box of 25 sheets of 8x10 in 1959 cost about what a 100 sheet box does today. The process chemistry was similarly expensive IIRC. In terms of today's dollars, the cost of color and B&W papers both has gone down by quite a bit, as has the process chemistry.

Now, that expensive paper was sold when there was no competition so to speak of except between Kodak and Agfa. Fuji and the others were not to be seen outside of the far east.

A roll of Kodachrome in Japan, with processing included, was over $10 in 1960. That was with competition from Fuji and Konica right there on the shelves with Afga. I used Japanese color films back then. They cost less. They were not as good as Kodachrome though and I regret not using Kodachrome or Kodacolor back then, just from the quality standpoint.

So, competition today has beat down prices quite a bit and has caused the companies to become very efficient with high speed coating and production running 24/7/365 to keep up with demand. Kodak could hardly keep up with its ww demand for film and paper and was literally forced to build the factories it did with that capacity.

Suddenly, the market turned around. It hit every photo company.

PE

 

[MattKing]

The other thing to realize when you are considering Kodak is that they were and to a smaller extent still are involved in a number of other businesses (albeit with photographic roots or connections).

They used to be a very large (non-photographic) chemical manufacturer - they competed with the likes of Dupont and others.

They also used to retail directly to professionals and others - in another post here there is reference made to TreckHall in Toronto, a professional photographic supplier. TreckHall is (as I understand it) the descendant of Treck Photographic, a company set up when Kodak sold its professional retail division (Eastman Photo stores, IIRC) to a number of its employees.

I refer to this to point out that, in the past, Kodak and others did compete in very competitive markets, and did do business in a variety of different ways. They had tremendous success, and they grew and prosperred. Their size and the complexity of their organization and their focus on analog materials may have left them inflexible and unable to respond appropriately to the massive and quick changes in the industry, but it is not necessarily the case that they are failing now, just because they had it easy before.

Matt

 

[gnashings]

There will always be a market for film photography, B&W in particular. Yes, I said market. As in professional work. Right now its a wave of digital induced euphoria, and I have no doubt of its (digital's) continuing dominance -but I also think that with clever marketing or without, there will be a snobby elite that will demand "silverprints" just as they demand handbuilt cars and wine that is hand made from beginning to end. And I think the post with the TV add in it is exactly what the film photo industry needs - a spin. Good advertisement can be the difference between a prdouct that also sells and one which becomes a phenomenon. Remember - most of the marketing successes over the years were due to a successful presentation of a concept, and a sale of that concept as a whole - not a product, but the whole idea. And I think any marketing student who does not see this simple truth will be fetching a lot of coffee in what fails to be their career.

 

[laz]

well I finally quit resisting and read this whole thread (the high point for me was PE's elephant joke) The questions of what will survive and what won't, when, why and maybe even will it return are just too complex to predict. But what has to be clear to everyone is that the heyday of film photography is over, dead, gone, not to be resurrected. No amount of marketing will ever bring it back into the fore.

Keep in mind I said film's heyday is what is over. Analog will never completely go away but a small group of devotes will not change what is essentially a market driven sea change. Mom and Pop are no longer grabbing a film camera and snapping pics of the kids at Disneyland. Grandma and Grandpa are no longer expecting to be sent an annual 8x10 of the grand kids, they're being e-mailed all they want year round.

Those in the actual biz of selling film and paper will make similar decisions about the fate of one product or another based mostly on the same thing Kodak did, the ability to make a profit. I don't think that at the end of the day Ilford, or any other multinational corporation has much power to change that.

There is hope in smaller companies. There will be more sensitivity and personal dedication to the art of photography such as shown by J&C and others and therein maybe lies our salvation.

-Bob

 

[Photo Engineer]

Very good comments here. I agree totally.

We are about at the point where handcrafted works of art using handmade B&W and yes, even color photographic materials will become things to be sought after and treasured. About 50 years ago, dye transfer portraits went for $10,000 each from high end portrait studios. They were quite the rage in some circles.

The future of analog may be the same.

I believe it so strongly that it is the driving force behind all of my emulsion and coating experimentation. I'm trying to make it work, and work well, so that I can pass it on in some fashion to all of the artists out there who want this medium to continue to be available to them.

I can buy film and paper, I prefer to create. I want to teach others how to do what I can do.

PE

 

[Christopher Nisperos]

This may be a tiny bit off-topic, but the thought crossed my mind as I read through this thread:

Anybody know what will happen to the coating machinery at Agfa and Kodak? Will they just be dismantled and tossed into the dumpster out behind the factory? Sold as scrap metal? Get melted-down to make tire rims? Sold to Ilford, Kentmere or Efke to handle the excess volume? Or just re-tooled and recycled to make frozen pie crust? What?

PE, this question falls into your domain with regard to your (admirable) ideal of passing on emulsion making techniques. Which brings up a second —perhaps naïve— question (especially addressed to Photo Engineer): What would be the possibility of building "tiny", garage-sized (or smaller) coating machines? Afterall, this kind of down-sizing isn't unusual for traditionally huge production processes. Remember, not so long ago (early 1970's?), traditional photofinishing machinery meant "BIG". Then came Noritsu and the one-hour craze. The desk-top paper processors. Today, a commercial photofinishing machine can often be smaller than yesterday's Xerox machine.

Heck, if they even make bread-making machines where you just add flour, yeast and water, turn it on and go watch TV till your loaf is baked . . . why can't the same be done for photo paper, right? Kidding aside, is it so silly to imagine "micro photo paper" manufacturers, on the example of micro breweries, for instance?

If my friends at Ilford, Kentmere, FotoImpex and Bergger want to strangle me after reading this, please relax. You know it ain't gonna happen. Even if it did, don't forget that neighborhood micro-breweries, the tiny pale-ale breweriesand commercial breweries exist happily, side-by-side (yes, I realize that the market volume isn't at all comparable, but you get my point).

Hey, manufacturers, here's an idea: along with selling us your finished products (which we'll continue to buy 'cause it's a sure thing), why not also offer us a "home coating machine" and sell us the raw paper stock, emulsion,
a cutting machine and a CD-ROM/DVD training program (starring PE, of course)?

By the way, if you ever see this idea realized, remember— you saw it here, first!

Any thoughts about my crazy fantasy?

 

[Photo Engineer]

Eastman Kodak donated one coating machine to RIT back about 20 years ago when the original Research Labs building was demolished. I have no idea what RIT did with it. I heard that it was never even used.

The more recent 'decomissioning' went more like a demolition from what I hear, but I wasn't there to see it close up. However, many of the machines are still there sitting idle and mothballed I have been told.

The Agfa plant in the US was just auctioned off piecemeal. This was widely advertized a few months back.

Polaroid has machines mothballed or just sitting idle.

A 5 inch wide coating machine is about the size of a 2 car garage and will coat B&W or color. The biggest problem is the air conditioning, water and power setup you will need for it. A 10 inch coating machine would occupy the better part of two ranch houses. One for the machine and the other for support equipment.

A full size machine is about the size of a football field, but rather up and down and folded on itself to take up less space. Considering that a master roll is 42" wide and over 5000 ft long, you see how large the paper roll is and how much space it takes up.

OTOH, a small hand coating operation can turn out about 1 dozen 8x10 sheets in about 2 hours time. It takes about 1 hour to make enough emulsion to do that. So, a micro-coating operation probably couldn't pay for itself unless it was a high end art form or a labor of love. The upside is that it is so simple that anyone who can turn out a reasonable photograph in a home darkroom can do this.

Another upside is that I can coat on just about any paper support I want with some beautiful rich effects that I cannot buy off the shelf anymore. I use Watercolor and Vellum surface papers which are very nice substrates. I can also vary my contrast, dmax and curve shape to my liking. So, I can actually match the paper to the negative in more flexible ways.

IMHO, the hand coated micro photo paper would be too costly, but the DIY kit would be a reasonable expense to the dedicated hobbyist. If someone could get a 10" or 11" machine, then supporting it would be feasible and the cost would drop dramatically and your idea would be practical. I believe that the product would vary more than from major manufacturers and you would see 'vintage' coatings and 'duds' from time to time if this were to take place. In this latter scenario, startup costs would be the killer. You might get the machine for a song, but learning how to make and coat adequate products would require a - Photographic Engineer. There are not many of us left.

PE

 

[Christopher Nisperos]

IMHO, the hand coated micro photo paper would be too costly, but the DIY kit would be a reasonable expense to the dedicated hobbyist. If someone could get a 10" or 11" machine, then supporting it would be feasible and the cost would drop dramatically and your idea would be practical. I believe that the product would vary more than from major manufacturers and you would see 'vintage' coatings and 'duds' from time to time if this were to take place. In this latter scenario, startup costs would be the killer. You might get the machine for a song, but learning how to make and coat adequate products would require a - Photographic Engineer. There are not many of us left.

PE

OK, thanks, PE. I'll go back to sleep and keep dreaming!

 

[ajuk]

There will always be a market for film photography, B&W in particular. Yes, I said market. As in professional work. Right now its a wave of digital induced euphoria, and I have no doubt of its (digital's) continuing dominance -but I also think that with clever marketing or without, there will be a snobby elite that will demand "silverprints" just as they demand handbuilt cars and wine that is hand made from beginning to end. And I think the post with the TV add in it is exactly what the film photo industry needs - a spin. Good advertisement can be the difference between a prdouct that also sells and one which becomes a phenomenon. Remember - most of the marketing successes over the years were due to a successful presentation of a concept, and a sale of that concept as a whole - not a product, but the whole idea. And I think any marketing student who does not see this simple truth will be fetching a lot of coffee in what fails to be their career.

I still think a TV ad would never happen, A "viral Ad" now that would work, Think about it a 30 second ad shot on B&W film then sent around the web by people who like it, It would need some shoking images and semi knacked ladies ETC! That would be great for Ilford, If I was a film student Id shoot it myself!