save Kodak - campaign to keep kodak film alive

[Kodachrome25]

According to this USA Today article, the motion picture film division might be up for sale as well:

"Kodak made a point of saying that businesses, such as consumer inkjet printing, motion picture and television film, and specialty chemicals, are outside of the core. Ken Luskin, president of California wealth management firm Intrinsic Value Asset Management, said the company seems to be indicating that it will also sell those businesses."

http://www.usatoday.com/money/indust...ess/57289302/1

I also got an email from Audrey Jonckheer last night that states Kodak film and pro paper will be represented at the Kodak booth at Photokina in Germany next month. At that time, they will launch the updated Kodak Professional Film website and brochures. It is expected to take until early to mid next year to finalize the sale of the still film unit.

The key thing to remember here is that Kodak is marketing both Kodak still film and the Kodak still film customer to the potential buyers, so we are all literally in the spotlight together at the moment.
So my feeling is lets not blow the chance we have all been talking about for years to get Kodak film in the hands of an eager new owner that could very well want to keep the products in our hands for longer than we thought possible.

Keep buying it, shooting it and for god's sake, keep the vibe as positive as you can, I am going to.

[BrianShaw]

... Kodak film and pro paper will be represented at the Kodak booth at Photokina in Germany next month. At that time, they will launch the updated Kodak Professional Film website and brochures. ...

Ooooooh. Goodie!

[Bob Salomon - HP Marketing]

"I would think that if our government can do all these other illegitimate functions, then why not buy Kodak too. As a taxpayer, I would love my tax dollars going to actually producing something."

As my job requires that I visit camera stores regularly in the USA I would strongly take issue with where you suggest our tax dollars go.

Not too long ago dealers had large coolers (floor to ceiling and, in large dealers, the length of their store) that was filled with nothing but film and paper. Plus there were shelves, gondolas in retail speak, filled with enlarging paper. It also was not unusual to find coolers or freezers off the sales floor that were full of back-up stocks of color film and paper as well.

Have you looked in a cooler recently? You will find in most dealers very little paper and film and you will usually see some lunches, empty spaces, water and soda bottles.

The film business, like it or not, is declining rapidly. The car business isn't. While people still drive cars they mass market and many pros today are not using film. I don't need tax dollars to support a buggy whip industry.

If everyone here filled their freezers with only Kodak film it wouldn't make a dent in the film statistics. Today you do not have a bunch of wedding and portrait shooters buying bricks of film weekly. You don't have industry, press, police, fire, insurance companies buying cartons of film monthly. In fact, many companies no longer even have a photo department today.

A few years ago, when Charlie Brown was still Chairman of the old ATT I was selling Hope processors. I could visit Western Electric's main offices in NJ and I actually sold an E6 processor to seperate departments on each floor of the building! That was how much film they were burning through for their multi projector slide presentations which Charlie Brown loved. Think of how much film and chemistry business that alone was that disappeared and will never come back.

How would you propose to replace that lost film business?

As an aside, some of you may know, that we are owned by and are the distributor of Gepe and Geimuplast slide mounts. Gepe is the World's largest manufacturer of slide mounts and Geimuplast, a division of Gepe, is the inventor of the Pako/Pakon slide mount for labs. A few years ago Gepe and Geimuplast were our best selling products. Today they are a fraction of what their past sales were. This is a direct reflection of the drop in slide mounting at both the consumer and the lab level. How would you bring that missing film business back?

I don't know about you, Richard, but when I go to the supermarket or the deli I am not at all restarined as to what I can and can not purchase to eat. I can chose to go organic or not. Buy meat or go meatless, buy rich ice cream or dietary versions. Buy sodas, coffee, wine, milk, tea or anything else I want (except I can't find Lindt crackers!

I assume I live in the same country you do but do not feel the constraints that you seem to be under.

[Ben Syverson]

Stranger things have happened... I was skeptical of the Save Polaroid project, but ultimately The Impossible Project was formed. The creator of Save Polaroid was Dave Bias, who is now Vice President of Impossible USA.

There's still a market for color still film, so there's still hope.

[Kodachrome25]

If everyone here filled their freezers with only Kodak film it wouldn't make a dent in the film statistics. Today you do not have a bunch of wedding and portrait shooters buying bricks of film weekly. You don't have industry, press, police, fire, insurance companies buying cartons of film monthly. In fact, many companies no longer even have a photo department today.

What on earth ever gave you the idea that anyone is trying to bring back *that* kind of market? Film use is niche, as in used by amateurs who simply love it and pros like me who prefer it to digital for things like fine art work, non-deadline editorial and ad shoots that don't mind adding a small film budget to get things out of the box ( more than you might think ).

You have Ilford who has not only re-scaled to adapt but clearly recognizes there is a market for film that gives them modest profit each year, why throw that away because the utterly out dated and ever increasingly under employed wedding industry is blowing through thousands of digital snaps per wedding versus hundreds of exposures of 220 film?

Things simply look different from my side of the camera Bob....

And by the way, Kodak is 110% aware of the scale and market that now exists and will exist for film and are marketing the still film division accordingly. It may turn out that it is only possible for Kodak still film to live as long as motion does, or it may be possible to find a way to innovate the production to a more long term solution as the market declines for MP stock. Garrett Kokx is a pretty smart guy, they know what they can and can not do at Building 38 to make things happen for the long term. Under new ownership, maybe Kodak still and motion film engineers won't have their hands tied so tightly to both legacy costs and supporting sectors that have failed such as inkjet and the like.

Decline does not always equal utterly vanish....

[Bob Salomon - HP Marketing]

Actually they don't. We have not been involved in the wedding/portrait market since 1996 when we stopped distributing Rollei.

But we have been in the large format camera market since the 70's when we became the Linhof distributor and since we were founded in the early 70's as we were the distributor for Carl Zeiss and Voigtlander large format lenses. Today we are still the distributor for Linhof as well as Wista and Rodenstock. So we are very deeply involved in your side of the camera. But your side is not a growth market today either. It is a small niche market also. It is very easy to see that if you just compare the number of stores that today support lager format vs 10 or 20 years ago.

[Ivan J. Eberle]

I too was alive when recurring film sales guaranteed the profits of neighborhood camera stores-- in practically every burg, dale, and boro in the shire. My town, Monterey CA, had several one-hour E6 processer operators serving numerous pro 4x5-shooting studios. But these all summarily dumped their sheet film cameras for ones that didn't cause thousands of dollars of recurring consumables cost each month, when the declining-ad revenue still image publications they catered to decided the results of digital capture and lower costs were acceptable. At it's peak there was a mind-boggling volume of commercial business-- and that former business model simply ain't coming back, no chance of that. It's cratered, it's gone. (Woo-hoo! Cheap cheap cheap sheet film camera/lens on eBay! How we LFF'er's have reveled in this bonanza. But recognize from whence it came.)

It's also true that over the same period tremendous advances have been made in film stocks--especially color negative film stocks--resulting in the very best emulsions that have ever existed. Kodak owns a couple of these. Films so good that a $25-to-$250 film camera combination might indeed be capable of taking images that trounce $2500-25,000 digital ones, under the right circumstances.

Yet there's zero indication of Kodak marketing this in any way that would result in a sustainable niche for them. Anyone smart who'd invest in their film lines would want to quantify that niche before jumping in. My hunch is there's a business here that's annually worth at least in the high hundreds of millions worldwide, which still seems like a lot to me. But it's probably too small for acquisitive merger-mania corporations to notice or care about.

Kodak culture seems unable to reinvent itself in this way, but going forward such an industry might present a solid, groovy business model if the capital needs to keep it vibrant can be scaled proportionately.

I'll go out on a limb to say that most everyone here on the LFF would like to believe it's possible-- that a dedicated group of folks could drawn together to make this happen.

p.s. not exactly analogous but I can recall how everyone said Apple was no longer a player, as it was stumping along with $3 or 4 B in annual sales with an insignificant % of market share in the personal computing market...

[Brian Ellis]

. . . Under new ownership, maybe Kodak still and motion film engineers won't have their hands tied so tightly to both legacy costs and supporting sectors that have failed such as inkjet and the like. . . . ....

Actually ink jet was about the only bright spot in Kodak's first quarter 2012 results.

"On the bright side, it increased its liquid assets from $500 million at the end of 2011 to $1.4 billion presently, largely as a result of new financing and the bankruptcy proceedings. It also saw a 34 percent increase in "consumer inkjet ink revenues," so at least its new chosen industry is doing well."

http://www.theverge.com/2012/4/27/29...llion-net-loss

[Kodachrome25]

Yet there's zero indication of Kodak marketing this in any way that would result in a sustainable niche for them. Anyone smart who'd invest in their film lines would want to quantify that niche before jumping in. My hunch is there's a business here that's annually worth at least in the high hundreds of millions worldwide, which still seems like a lot to me. But it's probably too small for acquisitive merger-mania corporations to notice or care about.

Ivan, this is not entirely correct. For starters you mention the very real and present decline in print ad revenue. This is partly due to the economic crash of 09/08 and more profoundly due to social and web advertising replacing it, hence the decline in magazines that would show those ads. I am not sure how much Fuji and Ilford have taken out in spendy print ads in PDN, Popular Photography and other periodicals but they tend to cost tens of thousands and that is not something we can realistically expect from Kodak's current situation or even going back 2-3 years when losses were mounting with the exception of 2007 ( ? ) when patent suits yielded a different number.

But Kodak does engage in social marketing such as Facebook pages that have "Likes". For example, Ilford has 3,802 likes, Kodak Professional 3,631 and Kodak it self over 437,000 likes. Colleen Krenzer has been posting on Kodak Pro on a regular basis, digging up interesting projects, photographer profiles and generally fielding questions, comments and complaints. It would not be out of the question for new Kodak Still Film ownership to engage in a more forward thinking and progressive approach to both market identification and campaigns, there are ideas out there, but they have been hard to implement under the current corporate structure, especially considering the C-11 filing has all but put the breaks on marketing of any kind for any division.

You want to use film in the future, regardless of brand? Then make sure your friends are using it too, this is going to take a grass roots approach to casting the net far and wide. Not only are the old models of marketing dead, the expectation that they should ever return should be too. If a company sees momentum in social, they might just take out a $30,000 ad for a quarter, but if there are the sound of crickets on a Facebook page, don't bet on it.

Besides, did you miss the part I wrote about above in that Kodak Professional is going to be in Cologne Germany for Photokina, will launch the updated Kodak Professional website and be handing out the new Kodak Professional Film brochures? If it were mentioned that Ilford or Fuji were doing this, people would say "Golly-Gee! I sure love Fuji, way to go!" but because it is Kodak, no one seems to give a crap.

Partisanship in a declining industry with old pissed off film shooters who can't get passed the way it used to be is a sure fire way of working against what should be the way forward.

[RichardSperry]

I assume I live in the same country you do but do not feel the constraints that you seem to be under.

I will honestly say that I did use hyperbole.

I was able to contest the "failure to turn left" ticket . And won. It took two court appearances and about 8 hours of my time. So while one branch of the government may do one thing another may do another, I will have to give you that. Hopefully I cost the whole system much more than what they wanted as revenue from the ticket. As an aside, the judge did inform me that one does not have Fourth Amendment rights if the police announce ahead of time, in the newspaper or on radio, that they are going to search you.

My city just cracked down and cited a bunch of massage parlors because some of the masseuses dressed sexy. If I want to get a massage by a hot Korean woman in a teddy, why do you and your government get to say I can't?

Will the government let me eat marijuana? Not in my country, it's illegitimate. Speaking of cancer...

Have you been reading about this whole Armstrong thing. Some government weasel is crawling up his rectal tube because he used hydrocortisone on his butt for saddle sores and hemorrhoids because he rides a bike. He should have known that hydrocortisone is a steroid, and it enhanced his performance; everyone else knows that, fricken cheater.

Strap on the rat cage, Bob; it's only going down hill from here. Everone else gets their little pet project and TOBOL stuff, I have only one and you have to object to it. I don't care if the whole Kodak film industry wittles down to 12 people in lab coats making enough film for 200 film photographers. If everyone else gets their tax wasting projects, why can't I?

Most of these things are lifestyle laws, and I doubt they affect your lifestyle(you probably live a nice wholesome lifestyle they want you to live). I don't think its legitimate that people should use the government to force one to live a particular lifestyle or not. So ya, I doubt you're constrained.

So I still say let the Feds make a bid on the company, say limit it to .01% of what they just gave to the bankers. Run it at a loss even, I don't care. Consider it a national historical trust or NEA kinda thing. Sure beats packing up all the equipment and shipping it to Croatia, using the IP model.