That's a questionable reading.
So what are the counter-examples? The ones you gave pretty much prove my point - product life cycles that span 30+ years and when a new version is introduced, it's such a marginal change that most won't even notice it.
Also, I wonder if the people critical of my interpretation actually listen to what the guy says, how he says it, and also to what he
doesn't say in the video.
Here's a bit starting around 12:00 starting with a question that I paraphrased, but the (montaged) answer is more or less literal transcription:
Q: What is to be expected on the B&W side and specifically LF
A: In terms of new B&W products we have just launched Kentmere 200, so Kentmere is our I say more affordable value range.
They're made through the same high-quality process as any Ilford film is made. And I think that's probably the best value films out there on the market.
In terms of B&W films in general, we now havel 12. Three Kentmere, 9 Ilford. So we conver most of the differen characteristics you can get from black and white film.
And sheet film we've got four different sheet films. So that is something we have looked at, to see if we can start introducing some of our other emulsions as sheet film.
We get asked all the time for PanF+. We've been asked for SFX, Delta3200. So all of these other films people want. We just need to see if we can do it in a cost-effective way.
We don't want to bring products to market that price people out of being able to afford it. So we have to do it in a way that we can do it cost effectively, essentially. It's always a challenge to do that where it's potentially more niche than something else.
Black and white is something that's still very important to us. But a lot of our R&D is going into color.
What he basically says is that the amount of R&D going into B&W is really small. This is in a relative sense to their own R&D effort, and as noted above, the absolute R&D investment of Harman is small to begin with, so we're looking at really, really small investments in B&W. Much of the answer is about bringing
existing emulsions into sheet film format (to answer the question asked by the interviewer) and besides the recent introduction of K200, no actual development of brand new products is mentioned, hinted at, promised, foreseen etc. When the answer starts to go in the direction of B&W R&D in general, it basically cust short in the observation that they're really focusing on color.
I don't see how anyone could read into this that there's something major happening in the B&W domain. There isn't. It's mature, it covers all the bases and other than keeping it alive, there's really no impetus to change much about it.
And the talk is
all about film, for the obvious fact that this is the cash cow, and not paper for bleedingly obvious reasons that take no rocket scientist to figure out. Insofar paper is relevant, it's firmly the inkjet side of things. IDK how many of you follow Harman on e.g. LinkedIn; if you do, you'll notice that their updates are 95% about inkjet papers and 5% about Phoenix. This reflects where the revenue potential is. They're not going to waste time talking about stuff people don't buy.