Death of Film continues...Eastman Kodak hires bankruptcy law firm

That will go too.

 

Wall Street Journal just posted. I can't read the whole thing w/o a subscription but I assume it's written off the press release.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444812704577607700939340864.html?KEYWORDS=kodak

A terrible day for analog film fans. Terrible.

dan c

 

'Kodak to sell film business that made it a blue chip'

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444812704577607700939340864.html

 

Somebody, anybody, please shoot Kodak and put it out of its misery!!!!

Without film and photography WHAT is Kodak?

 

For decades, Kodak has made more profit from their patents than they did photographic film. This is a huge company that did a lot of different things. From many analysts' perspectives, the main reason why the company died is that they invested in a lot of really bad businesses over the last 20 years, and lost a lot of money. That, plus the economy and the transition to digital all killed them.

I worked for Kodak for 2 years in the early 2000s (a digital division), and saw some harrowing things in my time. We knew film only had another 10-12 years, tops, but the top VPs disagreed with us.

 

I'm kind of surprised they're holding on to the cinema division. It's profitable now but will still lose market share. Splitting up the operations seems like more trouble than it's worth, don't you think?

Agfa kind of did the same thing several years ago and that did not end well. I think technically they spun off the still photo biz into Agfa Photo. It failed soon after.

Judging by the outrage, sadness and shock on Twitter and blogs there are still a lot of very passionate photographers still using Kodak film. Enough to make investors buy into it? I sure hope so, but I can't help feel a lot of dread about this.

dan c

 

will they be totally out of the digital retail camera business?

 

I don't think anybody is making money with low-end digital consumer cameras right now. Hell, the one in an average phone is better than what you could buy for $1000 ten or twelve years ago.

 

I disagree...Kodak's last model the Z990 is an incredibly versatile camera and we will never see features like this again for such a reasonable price...I prefer using a camera to take photographs than a phone...

 

You misunderstand. I'm saying they're not making any money with low-end consumer cameras.

I don't think a 1990s-era digital camera has the dynamic range or resolution of the built-in camera in an iPhone 4S. Look at it this way: what's in phones today is 1000 times better than what we had in an Instamatic in the 1960s and 1970s.

I'm sad about Kodak. I did a shoot this week and wore my old Kodak cap proudly. The DP noticed it, pointed to my head and said, "wow, what a relic!" And I quipped, "yeah, and so is the hat!"

 

They already are.

Kodak introduced the first usable DSLR around '95 or so. The AP started using them right away. Horrid beasts but they were deadline savers. When we got our first digital camera system for the newspaper in '98, it was a much improved $15,000 Kodak built around a Canon EOS SLR. I had no reason not to think Kodak would continue to be a part of every photographers life.

A couple of years later Nikon introduced their first DSLR. Felt more like a real camera over the modded Kodak, a bit better, faster performance overall (but skin tones sucked big time compared to the Kodak). That was really the turning point. The journalism market abandoned film with whiplash speed.

I think looking back that 2001 or so was the real beginning of the end for the Kodak era.

dan c

 

I understood exactly what you were saying...just an elaboration.
went to Kodak's website and it was sad to see their top cameras..."no longer available".
a phone is not a camera...as much as one wants it to be...it's a perk.

 

IMO, up until the end they had some great point and shoots that will be serviceable for years to come...my old 3600 still takes great "Kodak Color" pics...and my Z990 is amazingly fun camera for the price I paid...they had a great run...

 

I agree. But: average people are perfectly content to use their phones for taking quick snapshots of their kids in a school play, or a friend's birthday party, or everyday events. You always have your phone on you; you don't always carry around your camera. This completely killed the concept of a cheap consumer camera.

I'm still hoping somebody will write a grand, sweeping book about the epic failure of Kodak, and how they did so well for so long, then just tanked during the 2000s. It's a very, very complicated story with a lot of fascinating characters, sordid scandal, bizarre misadventures, bad decisions, and terrible luck.

I just remembered another conversation with a Kodak VP around 2003: we talked about whether film negative could compete with digital, and he laughed and said, "Marc, we could cut our prices in half and still make lots of profit!" So they were convinced the rainbow was gonna shine for at least another 20-30 years.

I think Kodak could have survived provided a) 9/11 never happened, b) the U.S. hadn't gotten into such debt with a trillion-dollar war, c) the economy had been better, and d) Kodak had cut film prices early on. Still cameras were a lost cause, but they could've held onto some of it.

BTW, note that Kodak spent $100 million on developing a Digital Cinema division, and that tanked around 2007. So they knew the end was coming by that point... too late.

 

yes, the camera phone is great convenience for the masses...
BUT, I don't agree with you on the 911 theory...mere peanuts to the amount spent post 911...

 

I think the people running the impossible project should buy out the still film division of Kodak. They've been doing a great job with the Polaroid stuff. But even if they have to drop Polaroid and take care of roll/sheet film production... Priorities man. Ain't nothin like tri-x.

 

A whole lotta crap hit the wall right after 9/11. For example, four magazines my partner and I wrote for all went out of business or got bought and sold within a year of that. 2002-2003 was devastating for the publishing business.

Publishing, music, radio, TV, video, film... all these things are related. There's a huge technological paradigm shift going on, and many bodies are falling.

 

I guess it's easier not face reality...we are tanking fast and there will be no recovery eventually...line up the major corporations that folded...it's scarier than a horror movie...reality bites some and feeds others...

 

Sad but true.

The new Keanu Reeves documentary Side by Side goes into the death of film in great detail, and tells the story very objectively. I think Kodak declared bankruptcy after the documentary was finished, but it was clear they were already on that path.

http://sidebysidethemovie.com/

 

This has a bit to do with the doc you posted (really looking forward to seeing it later!).

As mentioned earlier Kodak is holding on to their cinema film division for now. Right before the sad announcement there were two interesting developments.

A) Kodak announced successful renegotiations with Hollywood studios on film prices. This also included a promise from Kodak to give sufficient notice to the studios if it decides to end film production. The contracts are good through I believe 2015.

B) Kodak just introduced a new film stock specifically for archiving, and will introduce new B&W archiving stocks soon.
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/kodak-new-film-archiving-365125

This has to be seen as a transition period for both companies, each kind of buying as much time as needed until the end finally and inevitably does come.

If analog fans are lucky and Kodak film continues to be produced independently in a niche market, perhaps that new company could continue making cinema stock for the Chris Nolans of the world.

Maybe and hopefully, but things are looking very dark.

dan c

 

As much as I adore the Impossible Project (and just received some new SX-70 'cool' stock to play with!), I don't want Kodak film to be weird and experimental. I want Kodak film to be Kodak film. I want Tri-X and Ektar. I want near perfect batch to batch, roll to roll consistency. I want it to be at least reasonably priced and accessible. I want Kodak!

dan c

 

Let's see if I'm understanding this right. In Spain, certain amount is discounted every much (apart from taxes) fot things like Social Security and pension. In my case, 24% of my wage goes back to the State who administers this money, therefore "insuring" your future, if laws don't change.
Are you telling me that in the US your pension is paid by the company you worked for, and regardless how loyal you were to them, they can pull the plug on you, let's say being 75, and leave you with NOTHING?

 

For better or worse, I would argue the iPhone produces much better images that most people got with cheap point and shoot cameras for years, especially when one considers that those old shots were usually printed as 3x5s and have faded over the years. Negatives? Who needs negatives?

As far as the main topic is concerned, at some levels I do feel this is a shame, but at the same time I haven't touched a roll of film since I got my D200 in 2006. I haven't gotten rid of my film cameras *yet*, but that's more because I just haven't gotten around to it, rather than consciously hanging on to them.

 

Yes. If the company goes bankrupt, and they can prove they no longer have the money that was supposed to be invested in your pension fund, you get nothing.

That will only work for YCM separation negatives (aka "3-strip" color), and not every studio is willing to spend that kind of money to preserve their films. To be honest, the low-fade modern color negatives will last a long, long time -- at least 60-70 years.

The other good news is, film projectors and scanners are simple enough that it's possible to re-engineer them well into the future. It's not nearly as hard as, say, building a CD player from scratch. The mechanics are relatively easy, and the pickup is essentially just a solid-state camera.

What I wish had been done was figure out a way to preserve raw digital data signals on B&W film. I was specifically told, though, that film emulsion could not resolve that many bits unless it was spread out on several different frames, making it impractical. It could work with digital sound information, but not digital picture (at least 2K and above).

 

Just wait until more people start losing their photos to hard drive crashes and such. They're gonna wish they had their negatives back (or a really good archiving strategy). I already know one friend who lost a vacation's worth of photos, and he should know better, being an IT guy. Another friend nearly lost several years of photos when her external hard drive stopped working. I was able to help them recover those...

Derek