Kodak to exit bankruptcy

[Ari]

Kodak will make it. The UK pension fund may own the film business now, but Kodak still owns and runs the manufacturing plant that will supply it.

Thanks, Oren and Drew; I have not kept abreast of the messiness.

[Daniel Stone]

Point is:

Don't buy up a lifetime supply, just buy consistently. Consistently enough so retailers small and large are constantly having to rebuild inventory, and thusly, new product will need to be manufactured.

I still wish they made at least E100G though, that was a really beautiful, very versatile film. Scans like a dream too!

-Dan

[Camillou]

Point is:
I still wish they made at least E100G though, that was a really beautiful, very versatile film. Scans like a dream too!
-Dan

Yes, E100g... For 8x10 portraiture it was a real wonder. Now that fuji has discontinued Astia there's no low contrast slide in sheet films left.
What a sadness...

[Steve Smith]

Kodak will make it. The UK pension fund may own the film business now, but Kodak still owns and runs the manufacturing plant that will supply it.

Unless they sub-contract it out to another company.


Steve.

[Sal Santamaura]

Kodak will make it. The UK pension fund may own the film business now, but Kodak still owns and runs the manufacturing plant that will supply it.

Unless they sub-contract it out to another company...

Terms of the agreement between Kodak and the Kodak UK Pension Plan have not been disclosed. They may be proprietary and not disclosed even after the deal is consummated around September 1.

Depending on those terms, the new marketing/distribution company may or may not be permitted to sell films not manufactured by Kodak in Rochester's Bldg. 38 under a "Kodak" brand. It may or may not be permitted to use the Harrow plant, which currently makes color paper, to coat films itself and sell those under a "Kodak" brand.

None of the answers to these questions can be discerned at this time by "outsiders" like us. If the agreement terms are not disclosed, we would not find them out unless/until actual non-Rochester "Kodak" film product appeared. Idle speculation will achieve nothing except the dissipation of bandwidth.

In my opinion, the best way those who like and use current Kodak films can proceed is to simply keep buying and using them. If things change in the future, re-evaluate.

[Drew Wiley]

Why on earth would they contract it to another company? That would be simply shooting themselves in the foot. They've already got popular very-high quality
items which would be extremely difficult for anyone else to properly replicate, at least with respect to color films.. And they've got the Kodak branding. But the die
is cast with respect to the new normal of higher sheet film pricing and no more Kodak transparency film. Yet at the same time the new norm of smaller batches and
very versatile rather than redundant films makes their financial sustainability look rather promising. Other than that, the only way you're going to predict anything for
sure is to examine the entrails of an owl.

[Kodachrome25]

Drew, that is the elephant in the room, building 38 is at the moment, not a small run, reduced batch size coating facility as far as I can remember, and I toured it on official business back in 2009. Unless things have been re-tooled, each emulsion type in roll form and then sheet form is coated on mile long 54" wide master rolls with about that much in leader and tail. I'm sure they have been looking at all kinds of ways to rescale according to demand but any and all budget for moving that forward has been tied up in the drama of the past few years.

I highly doubt they would outsource it to another company and it is hard to tell if the Harrow plant is up to the task of coating to the level of the building 38 line, none of us knows. I do know that they often can and do get several expiration dates off of one emulsion number, so those dates are less of an indicator of how often it is coated and more of an indicator of how often they are slitting and packaging off of the one giant master roll.

I am cautiously optimistic we will have the same Kodak quality beyond 2015. In the meantime, I stocked up and now replenish like everything is gong to be fine...

[Drew Wiley]

As I understand it, they've resorted to using their prototyping batch equipment to downsize the runs, and the strategy seems to be working quite well. There's plenty
of talk about this on APUG by those actually familiar with the Bldg 38 facility. But I know the difference between emulsion batches and mere packaging dates. And
the current film lineup does have a strong following, and they are doing runs repeatedly. And we've got to differentiate runs on acetate film like 120, and our own
sheet film estar stock. A bit more complicated issue is the whole real estate and dedicated power plant apparatus there; but apparently that is ironed out too.

[Kodachrome25]

That's interesting news Drew, I did not know about the prototyping equipment factor, I only saw the big boy in Bldg. 38, a cool robotic affair who's mounting points are attached to giant concrete pillars that go straight down to the Rochester bedrock to reduce vibration. I think it is safe to assume that just like the marketing department for film, the coating department has great ideas to properly scale but both have had their hands tied in the C-11 proceedings....now they can move forward.

[Drew Wiley]

The film/coating div that affects us already had a solid jump start, a few months back, I think. What counts now is the legal standing of all the related corp infrastructure getting place into respective stable pigeonholes. I don't try to follow all the little details, just the practical trend. The film quality control seems better
than ever, and the remaining selection is certainly versatile, though I guess we've all lost a favorite product or two along the way. We adapt, as always.