It might be of interest to the posters in this thread that the CEO of Kodak was voted
worst CEO in America by a guy on CNBC. He is a marketing guy and has no clue about techincals.
Re: More Kodak discontinuations
It might be of interest to the posters in this thread that the CEO of Kodak was voted
worst CEO in America by a guy on CNBC. He is a marketing guy and has no clue about techincals.
Everyone in Rochester hates him, he is pretentious and is driven in a Bentley. He hates Rochester too.
George Fischer used to work out in the downtown YMCA with me. The earlier CEOs were Mormon Boy Scout leaders who were genuinely good people. This Antonio Perez is a greedy ass.
Yes and certainly one company having a practical monopoly can make it profitable even if it is a niche part of their business. But then again. We are talking about corporations here who have other goals than providing actual value to film photographers.Originally Posted by Gene McCluney
I've never heard of any formal agreement between Fuji and EK. But I assumed that at
a certain point they mutually figured out that neither one of them was making any
money constantly fighting over the same buck. So EK went forward concentrating on
color neg film while Fuji retained dominance with E6 film. They still fight over the paper
market, and Kodak still makes a very fine chrome film, even though Fuji's share seems
larger. Everything would change if Kodak stumbles, but even a bankrupty wouldn't
automatically change what does or does not continue to be marketed - it all depends
on the philosophy of whoever purchases the leftovers. They could be either smarter
or dumber than who's there now, or could chop up things and sell them in pieces
resulting in either catastrophe for film supplies or even an improvement. None of us
has a crystal ball telling us exactly what will happen.
Herb & Frank - you know the saying in the old days, how a captain with honor would
go down with the ship. Nowadays the captain is the guy who deliberately sinks the
ship so he can loot it going down, and then throws everyone else out of the life raft
too.
From what I see,
He should be the one driving the Bentley for someone.
Not being driven.
:-0
Compared to Kodak, Fuji doesn't offer squat for color negative film.
According to Fuji's page (link), they have three color negative emulsions, total. One of which is available in sheet film.
According to Kodak's page (link), they have four color negative emulsions, three of which are available in sheet film. One size in 8x10 is being made special order, so $15,000 buys 1500 sheets, which doesn't mean that it's going to be completely dropped.
If someone has actual retail sales information, like from a real store, then that would be informative. Otherwise none of us has a clue what's being bought, and in what quantity.
I did a quick search on previous comments regarding Ektar. When it was introduced two years ago, everybody was hopeful it would be produced in LF sizes, or pessimistic. Now that it's been out for one whole year in sheet sizes, 8x10 is being made special order.
Interview with Scott DiSabato, Inside Analog Photo podcast, Oct. 2010:
(at this time, they've been spam-hacked, so watch what you click on their pages)
Kodak is doing what they said they'd do last year. Buy it over the shelf, or else get together for a special order. The volume is down, and even not enough for a regular special order. If people switch to Ilford for their ULF, that's fine by Kodak. If they have you over a barrel for your color, then you'll get together with Canham.Black and white has been a really strong performing part of the portfolio. And in the last couple of years it has emerged as the largest part of the Kodak professional portfolio, so it's the largest film type that we now sell, which is great. And it makes a lot of sense. Black and white is really quite special, and digital doesn't even come close to trying to replicate the tonality and nuances and the grain structure in the image tonality itself, as opposed to being added on top of density values. So it's very tangible, people can go in the darkroom and work with it. And I think as an art form it lends itself very nicely to black and white images to film. They just go together. So to answer your question, yeah, while we're always looking at ways to become more efficient, and it's important for the entire portfolio that we continue to do that, the more efficient we remain, the longer we can offer a great range of products that we have. But when there is some inefficiency sometimes we need to just change the way we go about doing things. And I think the 8x10 announcement that we made at the end of the year is really one of those. We may have talked in the past about the fact that a dealer that orders product and it goes out of date and they end up losing money on it, or God forbid, throwing it out, then they will not order that product again unless they've got someone who will put money down for a case of that. And I think that's what we've been finding that as a stocked item the 8x10 doesn't make as much sense as it used to. And that's 'cause the volume and frequency has gone down over the years. That's fine. Our commitment to the film, though, is still there, we're just trying to figure out better ways to connect passionate 8x10 users with someone that is going to order that product. And it's not necessarily sitting on a dusty shelf in a town somewhere that used to have an 8x10 photographer that is no longer shooting that format or something. So we've sort of run into those issues, so, what we've done over the past year is we've started working with a camera manufacturer, Canham Cameras, and he has expressed interest in trying to consolidate on a world-wide level the demand of product which Kodak no longer stocks, but would like to make. We've had these special order programs for years and years, it's just hard for individual dealers and photographers to meet those minimums that we have. Kodak is set up for maximum efficiency, we have sorta touched on that before, and how important that is. When we have to sort of change the efficiency of our manufacturing flow by doing one-offs or special order items, we need to make it worth our while to interrupt the desire to be efficient, so we ask for the pretty hefty minimum of $15,000 worth of product to make that happen. So what Canham cameras is doing is collecting for sizes that we no longer stock or maybe never stocked. I mean, they're trying to collect enough for formats such as 20x24 or 7x17, other ultra-large format sizes. So he already has enough to already get the TMax 400 8x10 order in our system, so we're already there. So the order's already out there, you can buy from Canham Cameras to meet the needs of your customers, and I think there could be a different price scale if you were a photographer and wanted to buy directly from Canham Cameras. But I'd encourage you to go directly to the website there. And I believe it's CanhamCameras, one word, and there's an order form there, and you'll see that he has orders that he's collecting. So it's a change, but as long as we continue to make the emulsion and base combination, and we're able to get a $15,000 order together, Kodak will make virtually any product out there. That's kind of where we stand. So just a month, month and a half after the discontinuance, we already have a order for the TMax 400 in 8x10. So I want to thank everybody out there that kind of rallied together to place that order, but we may have to do more creative things like that in the future when the demand for stocking these materials is no longer reasonable but we can still do special orders on a less frequent basis and that tends to be better for Kodak to make sure that all the product we make is sold before expiration and the same think for dealers. They're really only buying it in this way if they have users for it. So, disappointing, maybe, if you're an 8x10 photographer that was able to get the TMax film by just walking in to one of the few dealers that was actually stocking it, but great news that we're still continuing to make this product and it just has to be consolidated a little bit better.
What's really got me worried is, "in the last couple of years it has emerged as the largest part of the Kodak professional portfolio, so it's the largest film type that we now sell," which infers that Kodak professional color sells less than B&W. And Kodak is still the leader for color film.
"It's the way to educate your eyes. Stare. Pry, listen, eavesdrop. Die knowing something. You are not here long." - Walker Evans
More of a PR quotation there and not really an indicator of the real-world fate of certain desirable 8x10 films. TMY 400 is going to be fairly popular, so there has already been two or more custom cuts made for group purchases. But even TMX 100 is going
to be quite hard to pool enough together to achieve an order. I was lucky to get the
leftover from an industrial order where a single customer bought almost the entire lot
of 8X10; but for all I know, that might last them a decade and no one else will have
the pull to meet the minimum. And that's my concern with Ektar too. Portra might be
wonderful when skintones are involved, but I don't want all my analogous shades in
nature turning into "pleasing skintones" rather than crisp hues. I'd be shooting chromes
except Ciba is now ending, and I'm surprised it's lasted this long.
More or less the same problem we had with last 3 prime ministers, here, in Portugal....
It's getting harder and harder to keep track of the discontinued emulsions.
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