Kodak Financial Woes Deepen: Film Future?

[Marko]

It's plain to see that Kodak has given up. What was once a leader is now a fading shadow.

What most are suggesting is roll over and let China control us. It's working and with the same crop of lame politicians it's not getting any better. We in the US are on the back of the bell curve, far down.

Frank has a point, while we are getting blamed for everything we might as well get something for it.

No M1A1 was put out of service in the Iraq war. The world says do something in North Africa and when we do they will immediately start to condem us. Then we will settle it with lifetime foreign aid.

Withdraw all foreign aid and spend the money on education and innovation. Don't give away technology for nothing.

Looking at the 2010 figures, foreign aid makes less than 1% of our current budget, somewhere around $15 billion or so. One third of it goes to only two countries - Israel and Egypt and is mostly spent on the military.

At the same time and in the same period, we spent between $1 and $.135 trillion dollars on military expenses (including wars).

I always wondered what is it that makes people feel so good denying medicare to seniors and education to kids in order to blow it away (quite literally) on the military?

Maybe, just maybe if we took these truly obscene amounts of money we sink every year into breaking things and killing people in foreign lands and directed it toward educating our kids, healing our people and building back up our infrastructure, maybe we could hope to get back to the top of the bell curve again within a generation or two... Even close to it would be good enough.

Perhaps being smart might help us a bit more than being tough? It would prevent knuckle scars for sure, if nothing else...

[rdenney]

But gasoline engines really suck. And the equivalent electric vehicle doesn't really perform as well as a gasoline vehicle, and it's so much more expensive. But of course if you don't care about the performance, then you can get something that's within your budget.

For the analogy to work, you'd have to be able to plug in a battery and go three weeks before a recharge. More than anything, the ability of digital cameras to make hundreds of images on one memory card is appealing. Electric vehicles are running into the physics of power density; digital cameras are not.

Rick "who commutes 150 miles a day" Denney

[rdenney]

Well, engl, from watching digital being adopted, it wasn't a case of "film is bad," rather, "digital is new and cool." It's been about glitzy doodads and lights, not necessarily about making a photograph of anything at all.

If you consider the vast majority of those who make photographs, you'll realize how elitist this sounds. But it is not the elites who make up a viable market.

And comments about how they are picture takers and not photographers says nothing about their importance as a market.

Most people who made photographs using film didn't care about film. Most of them took their film to Fotomat or the local drug store, got a stack of prints, put the prints in an album, and threw the negatives away. When family and friends came over, they put the album in their laps and subjected them to boring hours of thumbing through inane pictures of the last family outing.

Of that vast majority, only a few saw greater potential for the medium as a means of family reportage. They bought better cameras, and they kept the negatives. But they never did anything with the negatives. Maybe they made slides and the slides are sitting in some brittle Kodak Carousel up in the attic. The projector died and went to the landfill long ago.

Of that few, a tiny minority became serious about it. Those were the ones who actually bought decent cameras and attempted to make actual prints. Most of those prints were dreadful, though, because it turns out that it's difficult. But they enjoyed the hobby anyway.

Of that tiny minority, a handful took it to the next level and are attempting to explore the limits of their creativity. And of that sliver, a few find their potential using digital tools and a few find their potential using film tools. Many do both, because the image is more important to them than the medium, and each has its applications that are difficult to accommodate with the other.

In the early days of photography, we had only the sliver of dedicated enthusiasts. Kodak as much as anyone worked to build on that handful to create a vast consumer market of those who threw their negatives away after putting the prints in an album. But that consumer market no longer shows their photographs using albums. Now, they show their photographs on their Facebook and Picasa pages, emailing links for their family members. And they no longer subject their family members to albums, but now show their family snaps to visitors on their iPhones. Do you really think this is a market that will be impressed by image quality?

Now, Kodak is back to the market of its beginning--those few dedicated enthusiasts willing to endure the inconvenience of using film to fulfill their specific and narrow requirements, many of whom define the advantages of film in terms of film's characteristic look, not on any objective determination of whether their art needs that look to be valid.

The problem, though, is that all the innovation of an emerging technology is done. Kodak can't wow the market with its new dry plates, and then years later wow it again with acetate films, and then wow it again with color, and so on. At each major innovation, the added--no--multiplied their market. As the mass market who never showed their photography in a way that required quality has gone to the much more convenient digital medium, the market has divided. Kodak is hoping the division is done and maybe now it's down to subtraction. If there is any resurgence at all, it may generate a few additions. But the days of multiplication are long gone, and it's not Kodak's fault.

Perhaps the biggest mistake Kodak ever made was in creating a market for film use by those who didn't much care about photography, so that they came to depend on that vast market to survive. What made them great might be contributing to their current contraction. Huffy created a market for low-quality but really cheap toy-store bicycles that killed the high-quality budget offerings of companies like Schwinn. Then, the Taiwanese showed Huffy that when it comes to serving only a pricing model, American labor costs too much. Huffy is gone now, replaced by Giant and other Asian manufacturers. And why not? They buy most of them bicycles over there, too. American bicycle companies have re-emerged, however, with a quality model instead of a consumer model, with higher prices and higher quality. Is there something for Kodak in this lesson? I hope so.

Rick "hoping the sliver is enough to sustain a production model" Denney

[David Luttmann]

The "convenience" of film? Compared to what, wet plates? : - )

You can't sell something through advertising that nobody wants to buy. It would be like an advertising campaign for 8 track tapes or typewriters. Digital is just a better product for 99% of the people who use a camera and no ad campaign is going to convince them it isn't when it in fact is. It's not like great highlights or high resolution are important when making snapshots of a kid's birthday party.

The convenience is being able to drop off a roll, pick up prints and scans, and not have to spend time tweaking in front of a computer or kiosk to try and get the color right.

At to not needing high rez for birthday parties.....tell that to the average Joe who upgrades his point and shoot every year thinking that extra 1 mp in rez will make a difference in his birthday party shots!

[JMB]

[QUOTE=engl;696922]What would they say? For the needs of the vast majority of people, film is terrible.


Right. For sure. But the "vast majority of people" also shop at Walmart and dine at McDonalds on Valentines Day.

[rdenney]

The convenience is being able to drop off a roll, pick up prints and scans, and not have to spend time tweaking in front of a computer or kiosk to try and get the color right.

At to not needing high rez for birthday parties.....tell that to the average Joe who upgrades his point and shoot every year thinking that extra 1 mp in rez will make a difference in his birthday party shots!

Is that more convenient than poking a memory card into a computer at Costco and hitting the "print" button? That's what most people who want prints do. They are generally happy with the color they get, and if they aren't, they blame it on the camera.

But how many people even care about getting prints?

The guys who upgrade their camera every year have other issues they are addressing. But even if they believe what you say, they are no longer part of the film market, and no trumpeting of the qualities of film will bring them back.

Rick "not measuring digital convenience using a film-based concept of operation" Denney

[Tim Gray]

Tim, how did you sign up for free film?

When the Portra-2 films were released, there was a form/URL that was circulated on the forums and other places where you could sign up and get 4 rolls of Portra, 2 of NC and 2 of VC. Then around the time Ektar was released, Kodak made a flickr group and gave out 10 rolls of recently expired Portra-2 (it was actually the same sample film as the first giveaway I mentioned - by this time the Portra-3 films were out). They also threw in a roll of the new Ektar and nice sell sheet for Ektar printed on their Endura Metallic. All of this was free - all you had to do was sign up.

Of course there's also the rebates that they usually run. I don't think there is one going on now, but one just ended for $20 back on $125 of film.

[John Kasaian]

Digital is convenience. Who needs to print with digital picture frames? It used to be that Polaroid was king of "instant gratification" but even they bowed out to digital. Film photography OTOH is going the way of fly fishing, etchings and blackpowder riflery. It isn't disappearing, but rather becoming what it already was and has been since it's inception---the art of recording reality, to be mastered both in the mechanical and visual sense and appreciated for it's beauty.

In latin there's a phrase "If I labor to be brief, I become obscure"
George Eastman's Kodak was instrumental in making photography"brief"

The snap shot, the bread and butter of Kodak, Polaroid & Agfa has ceeded the throne to digital technology.
Artistic impressions are now (and perhaps better suited to) being Photoshopped. The holy grail of saturated colors can be saturated to your hearts content with digital.

The health of film (and the health of film manufacturers) I think will depend cultivating an appreciation of not only working with film, but an appreciation of traditional photography as a visual document written with silver halides ("quill on parchement" so to speak) rather than spurting ink.

My 2 centavos (and not worth even a penny )

[thomashobbs]

It seems like there's a decent supply of black & white film manufacturers but as far as color goes, for large format, it's just Kodak. I have nothing against digital but nobody is every going to fabricate an 8x10 digital back. The optical space and depth of field you get using a 300mm lens as your "normal" lens is like nothing else. Black and white is great but I remember my first color contact print from my 8x10. It was like mainlining heroin. I've never felt anything like it. It's depressing to think that color film will become a "lost" technology. Joel Sternfeld and Alec Soth aren't enough to keep Kodak afloat. We photographers are merely scavengers picking at bits around the mighty Military/Industrial/Entertainment complex.

[Marko]

It's depressing to think that color film will become a "lost" technology.

It will be just one of the many. That's not depressing, that's the price of progress. A good part of a century is much more than many other, equally valuable and useful technologies got, so be grateful that we had it and be happy that we're moving forward. If any single technology remained in use for too long, it would only mean that we are stagnating instead of evolving.