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What Kodak needs....seriously

zsas said:
Agree, market the "good ol days", look at the marketing Formulary uses, "old time", seems to work for them.
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And how many bottles of PF 130 do they sell in a week? It's a great way to sell products that can be made small scale and sold at the appropriate price. If you have a name like Gibson or Harley, you might even get enough people to pay that price. That's just not going to work for a product like Portra.
 
What does scale have to do with the marketing and grass roots engagement I am suggesting the new owners do for film based still photography marketing? Trader Joe has that old time grocery feel slant in their marketing and they look to be doing pretty good, scale is different than message. I'm more talking about connecting their base with the past and memories and emotion, classic, tis all I mean
 
Trader Joe doesn't have Kodak's pension liability to cover, if it did they'd be broke too. Maybe as a group we're suggesting screw Kodak's retirees, their pensions, and their health insurance?

To cover those folks Kodak is going to have to be a big company and generate a "lot" of income.
 
^is film commercially viable? That is for the suitors/creditors to decide, don't think any of us have the ability to see if there is profitability w/o going thru the books (although the quarterly results dont look too promising for film or any Kodak group), my comments presume someone/or group were to buy the Film arm and make a go at it...
 
Isn't kodak manufacturing digital sensors for the likes of the leica S2 etc? Im sure thats profitable if thats the case. I realise not many hideously expensive cameras like that are sold in comparison to others though.

My random ponderings suggest a number of things. One is that film has major archive/long term stability benefit. I wonder if in the next few years people will understand how unstable their million pictures of their kids on their computer is (possibly after they lose them in a crash). It will probably take a lot more than that to convert people back to accepting film though. It would be a nice world if film and digital shared 50% each of the market, more opportunity and availability of resources for all. Even my dad has suggested film is dead, thats just infuriating.
 

I think one issue however is that society no longer holds photographs with the same level of value - hence loss of them is not considered as much of a loss as it would have been before.

Why? Because effort to attain is now less than it was before.
Result: Less attached and perceived value because of lower original cost/effort.

The discussion itself may not entirely even be about film, really, but more about the Photograph itself.
 

The problem is that:
  • they do not care
  • they do not know
  • they do not want to know
  • and the don't care that they do now know
That is a big part of the problem.
 
Sirius Glass said:
The problem is that:
  • they do not care
  • they do not know
  • they do not want to know
  • and the don't care that they do now know
That is a big part of the problem.
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This might be evil of me to hope this, but they might decide they care when they completely lose their photo's of their kids growing up! - Just a thought.
 

The vast majority of people have no problems with digital instability. The "shoebox phenomenon" of unsorted, poorly managed image management existed long before digital came along.

Film is expensive and digital is cheap. A $150 camera with film requires more expense for every roll purchased and processed. With a digital camera each photo gets cheaper as the processing is inside on a tiny microchip. This is an economy that film cannot compete with.

A larger and larger majority of digital photographers no longer print. They upload and share. That's the new normal.

Converting people "back to film" is unworkable. Instead, film needs to be seen as an alternative process; a niche market with character all its own. It can be sold on that premise (sort of how Lomography does it), but film will allays lose the combined quality/convenience/cost argument because the first one is good enough for 99% of the market, and it wins the other two decisively. Digital can be seen as ubiquitous and the fast food , highly commercialized product, while film could occupy a (very) small niche as the "slow food" movement of imaging. A little more expensive, but contemplative and filled with alchemy and mystery and unpredictability. I see market space for that concept. I do not see film able to compete in any way for the majority consumer market mind share with digital.

One has to understand the Kodak spent a huge amount of capital trying to make film as near an instant gratification process as possible. Film and the Kodak logo were everywhere. One hour processing and so on. All of that costs money and is an infrastructure that digital wipes away with the rear LCD.

Kodak sold its CCD sensor division last year. Part of the purpose of the bankruptcy is to sell the digital imaging IP Kodak built up over the last 50 years largely because Kodak no longer has the revenues to develop products from it and would struggle to find the resources to defend their IP.
 
Danielle said:
This might be evil of me to hope this, but they might decide they care when they completely lose their photo's of their kids growing up! - Just a thought.
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Nahh, they will have them on Facebook

You are preaching to the choir...we all love fim and it's virtues, we are just the 1%
 
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Dude you sure get around, don't you? The thing you keep missing about your "audience" here is that they don't really care about how cheap digital is. Why do you insist on continually trying to convince APUG members of this? You're simply mistaken if you believe that the majority of people on this site want or even believe themselves that film is a mass-market consumer player.

Also, you're seriously ignoring one obvious aspect about the "shoebox phenomenon": that in the wake of bad treatment or storage, by and large most still have some semblance of their images - even if said images have suffered over the years. Anybody sane will take a degraded but still perceivable analog image over a stream of completely lost or unreadable binary.

The deeper issue is the treatment or cultural valuation of the photograph as a visual medium rather than the actual medium of the photograph. Lowering barrier to entry so low that images are now almost ephemeral and costless has resulted in the "no limits" effect: even more crap that's given less attention to than it ever was before.
 
zsas said:
Nahh, they will have them on Facebook

You are preaching to the choir...we all love fim and it's vitues, we are just the 1%
Click to expand...


Yes, I don't think anyone on apug needs converting.

*nods* Yeah your quite right, pictures in general are used in quite different ways now. There's no going back, I think we all realise that even though its partially sad too. Just so long as the film/analog segment of the market DOES stay available. I know its not about to go away anytime soon.

On a side note I love the replies and posts which get put up on this site.
 
I have no worry that film will go away (some of the players won't make it) but as some say, they still make buggy whips
 

Dude.

I was responding to one person who opined about some mass market equivalency. You're the one on the soapbox.

And you get around more than I do, as one can conveniently see from your posts


Why would binary be unreadable? There are standardized ISO formats, as film is a ISO format. Binary is math and unless you encrypt, the primer is algebra. Careful migration is/was a factor for celluloid as it is for digital. There's a lot of people working on it in a variety of ways.

But..oops! now you are engaging in the vs. debate. It's the "completely lost" hyperbole the I take issue with. That is hardly a common phenomenon. Carelessness in analog is as damaging in digital. It's more human behaviour than inherent in the medium.


I totally agree. So archiving a lot of this stuff that no one will ever look agains is either not worth the social or economic investment, or a clever huckster trick to sell through fear.

I would argue that the 1-hour photo did a huge amount to over-click in photography regardless of medium. The problem still existed, and the issue for film is now one of having difficulty downsizing once having thrived on the establishment of the scale.

However, film supporters need to care about the economy of digital because that is the benchmark. Film dies if it gets too expensive relative to digital. That's going to be a critical measure in the salvage of Kodak's emulsions, which is the topic of the thread.

I like the blue sky,thinking, Gibson's analogy. I'm not sure it translates to the mass production of film, because guitars never reached that size market nor are produced through such capital intensive industrial processes, but hypothetically the premise is sound as to what might happen with Kodak.
 

Max, I'd love to see pictures of your Tele if you have them up anywhere. 1950-1954 Teles are the best.
 
@Zsas:

They may not have their photos on facebook, if SOPA is passed here in the states. Also the Internet is so fluid that if your photos are all stored on <insert site here> and the business that is running it goes out of business, bye bye photos! IMHO it's better to have control of your backups yourself. I realize that most people don't back up their photos, and if they don't have them stored on FB or flickr or somewhere, they will be lost.

Of course, analog photos can be lost in a house fire, so that risk is there for analog photos too.

ME Super
 
All that is fine and well but cloud, FB, Flikr is going to be the 99% method. You dont have to try to sell me about storage (I have two cloud backups of my PC and a externalHD), but I work in IT, everyone else today (non-Apug'r) just uploads and forgets about it. I doubt if FB, Flikr or the cloud services will find themselves obsolete in 10, 20 years or their jpeg's will magically be unable to be seen, the archive-ability of analog photos is not what I think are it's selling point, its its nature that we really all love and care about. My wife scrap books using here dslr and prints at the pharmacy all her good prints, in my view we are on the same footing, if the house goes up she still wins as her work is backed up thrice and I am up a river, I aint making copies of my negs, ain't worth it, if my negs/prints disappear I just keep shooting
 
I also work in IT and have had to restore a system more than once from backups (thank goodness for those!) due to failed hard drive. We may be getting a little off-topic here though. My point is that Facebook, flickr, and the like are not the end-all be-all backup solutions for photos that we analog folk (or even us IT people) would like to see. If Kodak came up with a good quality inexpensive scanning solution (12+ MP from 35mm anyone?) for us film consumers that didn't use proprietary file formats (like the photo CD) for a few bucks a roll at time of developing, and do it along the lines of the "You push the button we do the rest" we would eat it up the way we do film. And for the masses, a decent photo storage site (like flickr) where users could store and share their photos for about $25 USD a year, many people would bite. I would, if only so I could have off-site storage for the non-traditional capture photos I take in addition to the film ones.

Me personally, I'd like to see Kodak (or at least their film division in whatever form it ends up as) keep and expand their E-6 film offerings, and offer the aforementioned good quality scanning service. Unfortunately that probably won't happen.

ME Super
 
clayne said:
Lowering barrier to entry so low that images are now almost ephemeral and costless has resulted in the "no limits" effect: even more crap that's given less attention to than it ever was before.
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Oh I wish. I had to sit through a laptop slide show of a friend's niece's 3 month trip to somewhere. At 2 hours she she said "its almost over", and an hour and half later and 300 more slides of every snap she shot for 3 months, it ended just before I was about to put the shotgun in my mouth.
 

Right. Your response is that you devalued the memory of the experience and, I assume, a lot of the photographs just based on sheer quantity. Because of the ease and lack of cost to make them, the producers of the images just pump them out and the consumers of them fall asleep by 20 images in - because already 20 images is too much.

That's the funny part though, editing (not screwing around in Photoshop, but selection) is so incredibly important to how people react to the images.
 


I agree. About 3 years before my return to film, we took a trip to Walt Disney World with another family. We ended up coming home with about 1,000 digital pictures of the trip. It is nice to have them but not to go through them and show people every single one of them. Nowhere near all of them will end up in photo albums or shared with others. Only the best ones go in the albums or get uploaded to social media sites.

Contrast the 1,000 pictures of the Disney trip with about 4 rolls of film shot on a trip to Yellowstone. A much higher percentage of the film shots were keepers. Its these pictures, of the trip to Yellowstone, that triggered my return to film. And not just film, slide film specifically.

ME Super
 



Nope, I don't think the barrier was lowered... I think the bar was just cleanly dropped!
 
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