Grey market Kodak film has faded away for two reasons.
The first is that Kodak was making it hard for the grey market importers, threatening to cut off their domestic supplies, which the sellers could not afford to have happen. (Professionals don't buy grey market film, too much is on the line for them.) Also, they have done more branding games, selling the same film under different brand names in different countries.
The second, and now more important, is exchange rates. The dollar is feeble, the Euro and Pound are strong. Kodak used to sell films at higher margins in the US, and at lower margins in countries with weak currencies, since that was all the market could bear. So folks would import the film from the weak currency countries back to the US. Well, now it's the other way around. Many manufacturers now have to accept low margins in the US, and profit from high margins in the strong European economy. The grey market has turned around. Been shopping downtown in any major east coast US city recently? You'll see a lot of Euro-tourists taking advantage of the fantastic deals that they can get in the US. (OK, so they are also dodging their 17-20% VAT taxes. But that's only part of it now.) I work next door to the Cambridgeside Galleria, the closest shopping mall to downtown Boston, which is on public transit, and I've seen and heard lots of Europeans there all summer. There was also a burst of them shopping here last December.
While oil, and all the other raw materials Kodak uses, may nominally be priced in dollars, in reality they are priced in terms of buying power. As the buying power of the US Dollar continues to drop, the prices of these raw ingredients in US Dollars keeps surging. Silver was $9 at the start of 2006, it's now just shy of $18. The US Dollar will continue to drop until we stop borrowing so much money, which everyone knows will be paid back in much inflated dollars.
This means that someone else will probably beat me to it.
