The end for Kodak?

[Wayne]

I want to know where the fire sale on Ilford film is, because I'm in the market.

 

[removed account4]

I wish I had 300 rolls of Plus X 120. Let me know if you want to part with some!

hi jeff

i'd sell it to you if i could, but it's gotta last me a while ...

good luck in your qwest

 

[lxdude]

Wow, that was painful to look at! The best comment: "eye-gougingly awful."

Yep.
I also like the comment: "HDR is like Karaoke. Every once in a while you get a good example, but most of the time it's painful and causes you to wince."

 

[Aristophanes]

Yep.
I also like the comment: "HDR is like Karaoke. Every once in a while you get a good example, but most of the time it's painful and causes you to wince."

Film photography had its share of HDR moments. Soft focus lenses come to mind. Worse were the cut out filters of shamrocks and things, all painfully advertised in PopPhoto and other mags. Skeletons in every closet.

 

[lxdude]

Oh yes, photography's had its gimmicks and fads for a very long time.

 

[M.A.Longmore]

Oh yes, photography's had its gimmicks and fads for a very long time.

.
That's Why God Invented Spiratone !

Ron
.

 

[Rudeofus]

All these anecdotes befuddle the data. The hard financials for Kodak (and what I've been reading for Fuji) point to multi-year losses for film as the race to deflate the overhead was easily outrun by the loss of consumer and lately motion picture revenues. The pension and medical liabilities are still hangovers from the film era for Kodak and mean that the preponderance of red ink stems from over a 90% drop in photo film sales. Kodak is bankrupt because people stopped buying film en masse. Every other factor is trivial.

Writing pure conjecture and falsehoods over and over again doesn't make them right. The hardship at Kodak has been observed for a long time and has been discussed endlessly here on APUG, and the facts provided by insiders contradict your assertions. Yes, the downfall of popular film use certainly didn't help them but the biggest decline happened many years ago. Their digital blunders certainly didn't help either.

Kodak appears to me like someone who uses a truck to carry computers from the times when computers filled a room. The truck wasn't bad but hardly anybody needs a truck for that anymore. The truck was repurposed for all kind of other tasks but never handled them well, and you can't just make a truck smaller.

The Ilford truck got tossed out many years ago and was replaced with a slick computer bag, which does well. We'll see what will happen to the Kodak truck in the next few months.

Last year the motion picture camera makers stopped making new cameras. The rental houses are only using new old stock. This turns the entire film-based cinema market from an industrial operation to a salvage operation. They may have less than 10 years of depreciation left on those cameras as spare parts are also going to become scarce and uneconomical.

The decline of movie film use has already been covered here, and while this certainly hurts Kodak and Fuji (and therefore maybe color film in general) a lot, it won't harm the other players.

Every analyst who has looked at Kodak financials sees film as a non-performing asset with a rapidly declining user base and the abandonment if supporting industry third parties--the makers of cameras and the evisceration of local stores that sell and process film.

Who cares? Say good bye to the old Kodak already and hope they get reborn as a small and flexible company which makes color film. It might well be that the Lomo crowd will help resurrect color film, like them or not.

 

[lawrenceimpey]

The NP400 is discontinued also...

(there was a url link here which no longer exists)

 

[railwayman3]

Personally, I think I've read enough speculation for now. Nothing we say or do here will alter what happens with Kodak or the future of their products.....if you're feeling pessimistic, just stock up with any Kodak films which you think you might need, otherwise why not spend the time taking, processing and printing some photos, then check back in three or six months. We'll know then.

 

[Tom Kershaw]

As far as I understand the situation, the ILFORD facility was built in the early 1980s when there was much more use of black & white photographic materials for commercial and industrial purposes (e.g. newspapers and HP5). I suspect one key to the success of ILFORD Photo has been a coating line than can cope with defined runs of a particular product, and then be cleaned and changed over to coat for a different product. In comparison to Kodak building machines that are capable of coating Tri-X continuously for example.

Tom

 

[R.Gould]

Personally, I think I've read enough speculation for now. Nothing we say or do here will alter what happens with Kodak or the future of their products.....if you're feeling pessimistic, just stock up with any Kodak films which you think you might need, otherwise why not spend the time taking, processing and printing some photos, then check back in three or six months. We'll know then.

Here Here, whiles't I would be very sad to see kodak film disapear, especialy Trix, which I have used for many years, nothing we can say or do will change anything, and it would not be the end of the film world, Ilford seems to be still going well, as is adox,foma and other smaller makers, so why don't we all use and enjoy the Kodak films while we have them, and if they go then look around for other materials, and continue to enjoy the photography we love, I don't see film and darkroom disapearing in my lifetime,so just have fun with film,
Richard

 

[Jay W]

I worked for Kodak 1984-1990. At that point it was easy to see that Kodak management did not have good vision. They were using the highly profitable film "trust fund" to market (not manufacture) a new course. They tried selling:

-Floppy disks and Video tape (short lived)
-Batteries (that leaked). They thought they were equal to Duracell/Eveready.
-Sterling Drugs (bought high, sold low)
-8mm? video cameras (don't remember the format, but neither did anyone else)
-Verbatim discs

Ten years after I quit, it seemed like Kodak couldn't kill film quick enough. It seemed like they thought Wall Street was equating Kodak future with film sales, so they were killing film to show they had moved on. It seemed to me they should have tried SOMETHING to prolong films sales since film is extremely profitable. Off the top of my head:

-Develop a way to record digital images on film (like a backup hard drive) so there is a permanent record of your images that won't fail.
-Promote digital internegs and contact printing onto photo (silver) paper
-Feature a film photographer of the month
-Court the large format crowd of photographers. (They're the least likely to go digital.)
-Advertise film (wow, a radical idea)

Anyway, what I saw seemeed like Kodak was trying to show how it was "out of film photography," and that helped promote the general public switching to digital.

Unfortunately, I think Kodak will be sliced up and sold off as scrap, meaning film production will be gone in a year or two.

Jay

 

[semi-ambivalent]

Here Here, whiles't I would be very sad to see kodak film disapear, especialy Trix, which I have used for many years, nothing we can say or do will change anything, and it would not be the end of the film world, Ilford seems to be still going well, as is adox,foma and other smaller makers, so why don't we all use and enjoy the Kodak films while we have them, and if they go then look around for other materials, and continue to enjoy the photography we love, I don't see film and darkroom disapearing in my lifetime,so just have fun with film,
Richard

I can guarantee you discussions like this won't stop. They are a vent and, to some extent, a talisman to ward off evil. There's people here who feed themselves and their families via film photography, people who just enjoy the physical act of taking pictures (me), people who hold on to this archaic process as a way to hold on to a disappearing past and their memories of it (me again).

Thankfully, millions of cameras were manufactured. Thankfully, they are pretty robust devices, and with a little care and some grease from time to time they will certainly outlast their owners. So we have a plentiful supply of used cameras going forward*. That base is covered. With some very inexpensive tools one can mix at home all the great B&W developers so that base is covered. Film is another matter. It's complex, as PE has often alluded to, and even if you are able to coat your own 4x5 film I think coating five feet of 35mm film base would be not so easy. So when film supply is threatened it is worrisome. As good little consumers all we can do is buy film but if the situation is such that selling film cannot remedy the problem (like Kodak's) then that base is not entirely covered. There are other films out there but who's to say? Kodak was King once too, remember? My point here is that you should not expect threads like this to disappear or stay rational because the core issues are not entirely rational, or financial, or organizational.

You're entirely right about having fun. That's why we're in this.

s-a

* In 2005(?) Nikon released in Japan only a commemorative Nikon SP rangefinder. New production of, I think, 2500 units. They sold out. Poof. I seriously doubt Nikon would have immediately destroyed the tooling for those. I believe there will be a point of resistance reached to sales of yet another rev of digital cameras. Just like the hamster wheel of another more powerful computer every few years. Nikon's D4, the new flagship, has "only" 16M pixels; 30% fewer than the prior flagship's 24M, and the price is lower as well. What's up with that? Declining demand? I'm sure there's a lot of new-ness to pay for but perhaps Nikon has reached a point of declining returns on the tech, a point of stasis, and now needs frillier features to make sales. Like HD movies. Maybe the prosumer market is becoming sated. Meanwhile that SP tooling is out there... The CFO is trying to guess at Leica's numbers; tea leaves just have to turn up correctly.

 

[turle]

As far as I understand the situation, the ILFORD facility was built in the early 1980s when there was much more use of black & white photographic materials for commercial and industrial purposes (e.g. newspapers and HP5). I suspect one key to the success of ILFORD Photo has been a coating line than can cope with defined runs of a particular product, and then be cleaned and changed over to coat for a different product. In comparison to Kodak building machines that are capable of coating Tri-X continuously for example.

Tom

Tom, this is very interesting and smart idea too! Do you know when did the Ilford facilty introduced the "switchable" type of coating production? I have been using Ilford since the HP3 years and thinking that the PanF, FP4 and HP5+ were all having sperate lines of coating. Thank you.

Bob

 

[alanrockwood]

Here is a humble suggestion to all those who don't want to read or discuss this topic any further. Please avoid these threads and quit reading and commenting on the topic, and leave it to the rest of us who are interested in the topic to continue the discussion.

 

[BrianShaw]

It is like the car wreck that none of us really wants to see, but we keep staring nonetheless.

 

[Rudeofus]

Tom, I hope very much that what you wrote about Ilford vs. Kodak is correct, since dwindling movie film sales would only mean that those specific coating lines are going to be shut down while the lines for photographic film can continue to operate. Unfortunately, though, did PE not exactly create that impression when he posted about declining movie film sales and the resulting problems for us still shooters a few months ago, so it appears rather that Kodak uses at least their color film coating lines for multiple film types.

 

[alanrockwood]

I wonder if five years from now it will be possible to buy C41 or E6 film. I hope so, but if/when Kodak falls it won't leave very many alternative suppliers... Fuji, if they can manage to keep the film business alive. What about Ferrani? I don't even know if they are still manufacturing film. Any others?

 

[PKM-25]

Toured the coating facility at Kodak under NDA in June of 2009, it has been re-tooled to able to coat many different kinds of film on the same line, even more than one in a single day and smaller runs are possible. But it is still a big building, with vibration reducing concrete going straight down to Rochester bedrock some 40 feet below. We don't want to lose this facility...it provides the basis for the highest quality possible.

As far as I understand the situation, the ILFORD facility was built in the early 1980s when there was much more use of black & white photographic materials for commercial and industrial purposes (e.g. newspapers and HP5). I suspect one key to the success of ILFORD Photo has been a coating line than can cope with defined runs of a particular product, and then be cleaned and changed over to coat for a different product. In comparison to Kodak building machines that are capable of coating Tri-X continuously for example.

Tom

 

[R.Gould]

As long as their is profit in C41 or E6 I firmly believe that they will exist in some form in five years, if Kodak does go under then if those who use the film will switch to Fuji, who will have a virtual monopoly on color film of all type, but maybe a new player will emerge, from a completly new direction, who will take up the slack that kodak will leave, I want kodak to survive as a film producer, I love their films, and grew up with Trix as my mainstay, and will continue to use it as long as I can, but who knows what the future holds, and I think we just have to wait and see, and make our plans for the future the way the cards are dealt, what else can any of us do, other than to fall on our collective swords, and throw in the towel, and I for one have no intention of so doing, if in 5 years the only film still available is Adox/foma Etc then so be it, I will use that, I would rather it be Kodak but I am not giving up my photography until either I cannot get film or I am six feet under, so I still day we must wait and see what happens, but enjoy using the film while we can.
Richard

 

[BrianL]

In today's Toronto Star in the business section, there is a decent article on the pending Kodak bankruptcy and a case study summary about the company. A good read for university students in buainess programs. Not in-depth but, concise enoguh to understand. I suspect Kodak will soon become a mandatory case study for business courses as well as other courses.

 

[jerry lebens]

It's certainly true that Ilford/Harman use the same line to coat everything from film through to digital inkjet papers (and, as such, they're at the forefront of nano coating technology). But I don't know if what Tom says is true of the Kodak facility - although it wouldn't surprise me if it was true. Perhaps PhotoEngineer could confirm...?

I do know that when I've discussed the subject with people at Harman, they were confident that they could 'recreate' Tri-X without too much difficulty, if they wished to.

 

[mn57]

They're toast. There's simply no way to recover. After selling off 1000's of valuable patents and theier future-looking business units, there's nothing left to grow on.

 

[thomas l]

...because the quality stinks. And it's old outdated stuff.

This is nonsense. The products of Fotoimpex/Adox are not outdated and the quality is very very good. Just try Adox MCP or Adox MCC Paper. And there will be the new APX 100 and 400 with same quality as Agfa has been.

Thomas

 

[Worker 11811]

Just to add some humor here:

I have several old glass mixing beakers in my darkroom. Each time I use one I always smile a little bit.
When you look down through the glass, you see the words embossed into the bottom of the beaker:
"FOR PHOTOGRAPHIC USE ONLY KODAK"

I can not imagine that the arrangement of the text on the bottom of these beakers was entirely accidental. A little bit of subliminal advertising, perhaps?
Anybody who created and approved that design is probably long gone and anybody who isn't probably wouldn't tell you, anyway.