bmattock
Veteran
The paper, yes. The film equipment was sold off. I've posted the links several times.
The company's name is Hyosung. They bought the film manufacturing equipment from the AgfaPhoto receivers, dismantled it, and hauled it away. Their stated purpose was to produce coated (non-photographic) film products with it.
http://www.accessmylibrary.com/article-1G1-144415080/s-korea-hyosung-launches.html
http://www.alacrastore.com/deal-sna..._AgfaPhoto_GmbH_Slide_Manuf_from_NannO-442269
http://www.handelsblatt.com/unterne...o-werden-wieder-rohe-filme-produziert;1060618
Bei Agfa Photo werden wieder „rohe“ Filme produziert
http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-14848674_ITM
http://www.hyosung.com/eng/about/hyosung/history.jsp
http://www.displaybank.com/eng/info/print.php?report_id=2805
The APX films will never ever be back. It's over. There may be some film made with the Agfa on it, but it will be something else, it won't be APX, no matter what it says on the label.
bmattock
Veteran
All of their film manufacturing equipment, yes.
pakeha
Well-known
OK so Bill posted all the links[again] can everybody now agree that there will be no more agfa film? KEYWOOD=FILM:bang:
Chriscrawfordphoto
Real Men Shoot Film.
No because Fotimpex has stated that they are indeed going to manufacture the 100 and 400 agfa black and white films and that they have the equipment and the people to do so. The fact that they ARE producing the paper shows that they do have the capability to make sensititzed goods and that they're not just blowing smoke to get people's hopes up.
Bill doesn't work for them and frankly has no right to say what someone else he is not associated with is going to do when he has no idea what is really going on. If they decide not to go ahead with the project and announce that, then Agfa film will indeed never come back as there has been no other serious effort to bring back the actual Agfa formulas.
pakeha
Well-known
yes Christopher, i had considered your point about producing paper and then film at a later date, however, do you have a link,or just point in the right direction with a search to find the source of this infomation. I am interested, but he says-she says does`nt cut it anymore. thanx
bmattock
Veteran
Nobody else seemed to want the job. Now get back to work.
pakeha
Well-known
Who made him the boss? :bang::bang::bang::bang::bang:
ok, but at least he posts with some backup quotes and a link on this subject.
you know, it is only film and not WMD but some proof from both sides of the story is helpfull
ok, but at least he posts with some backup quotes and a link on this subject.
you know, it is only film and not WMD but some proof from both sides of the story is helpfull
pakeha
Well-known
KEYWOOD
that is KEYWORD I know!
that is KEYWORD I know!
ryan26
Established
I don't really care to join the discussion other than to bring this letter up, which I recalled reading in APUG forums. It was written in 2008. I know the argument will continue spiraling regardless, but it's worth noting another theory behind it - from the horses mouth.
Also don't fail to recognize the shape of the larger economy over the last year in all this talk of fiscal reports. Luxury industries contracted. One would only expect film to follow along those trends. Of course, there are larger trends to consider, but 2009 is an easy year to get all doom and gloom over.
sanmich
Veteran
Bill, I don't understand this:
In the web era, any online shop is a normal retail store.
Is amazon a speciality marketer?
If buying milk on line was a viable option, Kroger would probably go the same route.
It's just a new way of selling products, and doesn't say anything about how plenty or scarce is the demand for these products.
Pickett Wilson
Veteran
I don't think anyone would argue that the market for film is declining rapidly. What I can't understand in the abstract is why a savvy businessman would introduce new products into a rapidly declining market? As in, why would anyone want to resurrect Agfa film in any guise?
It's not like companies are still churning out new film cameras. You are pretty much betting your products future on folks using old cameras that are tossed into the trash when they stop working (those of us who play with film cameras at the high end are too limited to be much of a market for film overall). It just sounds more like wishful thinking than good business.
It's not like companies are still churning out new film cameras. You are pretty much betting your products future on folks using old cameras that are tossed into the trash when they stop working (those of us who play with film cameras at the high end are too limited to be much of a market for film overall). It just sounds more like wishful thinking than good business.
Roger Hicks
Veteran
Either Mirko at Fotoimpex is a very convincing liar, who is prepared to take a stall at photokina to peddle his lies, or Bill Mattock is wrong.
Cheers,
R.
Cheers,
R.
bmattock
Veteran
Amazon was a specialty marketer, but they have surpassed and now compete directly with the retail channel; in fact, they're eating it up. They're now a multi-billion dollar corporation. The market for books, meanwhile, has not decreased.
Freestyle is a specialty marketer. They have surpassed sales volumes of many retail establishments as the market for film has dropped. When film was king, Wal-Mart probably sold more film in a day than Freestyle did in a month. But that was never Freestyle's chosen market; unlike Amazon, they did not go out there intending to compete head-to-head with the major retail film retailers. They aimed for the education and professional markets, and they covered that specialty very well.
Film sales have tanked (year on year 30% drops, such that CIPA (Camera & Imaging Products Association) has stopped listing film camera sales, including the last remaining major seller, single-use cameras. As those sales fell off a cliff, major retailers like Wal-Mart and other consumer outlets have stopped stocking them. If Freestyle is competitive now, it is by virtue of the market shrinking to fit them, not by growth or by design.
Freestyle is now in an excellent position, and they are, as I said earlier, one of my favorite places to buy film. But as I say over and over again, we enthusiasts are not the market. We're not the mainstream. We like to think we are, but we're not. The market for consumer film *was* Wal-Mart shoppers and their kind, and now it's nothing, because it does not exist anymore to any appreciable extent.
Amazon and Freestyle are comparable only in that they are both online sellers. Amazon is a house-hold word, popular with the average computer-using consumer; Freestyle is still known only to the cognoscenti.
bmattock
Veteran
As I said before, I am cheerfully ready to admit my wrongness to all the world when NEW Agfa APX (and not relabeled something else) appears on the market. People make forward-looking statements all the time. They mean them when they say them, but that doesn't mean it will ever happen.
sepiareverb
genius and moron
An emulsion is a recipe, I can't believe that the machine that spits it out is nearly as important as the mix of ingredients in the emulsion. When Seagull G was 'improved' back in the early nineties the recipe changed, and the paper was different. If Fotoimpex has purchased the recipe why can't they make an equivalent/near equivalent film? A small company can afford smaller profits, and I don't doubt that if Fotoimpex sees enough profit in MCC paper and hears the clamor for APX 100 from the pathetically insignificant group of B&W film shooters they can give it a go. Economies of scale can work the other way too when the almighty stockholder is not the one who dictates what is acceptable. Isn't Ilford a perfect example of this?
Pickett Wilson
Veteran
With the film riches of the present, folks keep clambering for the return of film from the past, when they aren't buying enough of the current stuff to keep film makers alive. We are an emotional lot, aren't we?
Chriscrawfordphoto
Real Men Shoot Film.
With the film riches of the present, folks keep clambering for the return of film from the past, when they aren't buying enough of the current stuff to keep film makers alive. We are an emotional lot, aren't we?
People aren't buying enough for LARGE film makers like Kodak. Some of you people are so narrow minded. I come from an art background; the number of serious oil painters is far smaller than the number of people who shoot black and white films regularly, yet the art world keeps a large number of extremely small manufacturers of oil paint in business. Companies like Gamblin, Old Holland, and Sennelier whose products sell only through mail order art suppliers are selling paint alongside bigger makers like Grumbacher and Windsor-Newton whose paints are sold at big craft store chains like Michaels and Hobby Lobby. Note that Windsor Newton is a rather small company too and Grumbacher is part of a large corporation that makes a wide range of art supplies.
What's wrong with photographers that make so many so adamant that older tech products MUST die and that they must preach this incessantly to those who continue to use film? Photography supposedly killed painting as an art form in the mid nineteenth century, yet people still do it. Acrylic paints in the 1950s were supposed to have killed off the messier, slow drying, toxic process of oil painting, yet oil painting remains a popular medium among painters. I can think of a number of companies, some large, some tiny, still manufacturing oil paints: In addition to those mentioned above there are Schminke, Holbein, Rembrandt (Talens), Weber, Daler-Rowney, Utrecht, Daniel Smith, Shiva, Lefranc & Bourgeois, Blockx, and Lukas. Thats just the ones I can think of immediately.
wgerrard
Veteran
Very interesting that this kind of thread always has so much life, and that so many of us are so emotionally involved in the future of film.
In any case...
I can see that if Kodak has huge stocks of Tri-X stashed in the freezer, and if they can't sell it off in their boxes at their prices, it makes sense to dump the stuff to Freestyle. But, cash flow or no, if the market could absorb the Tri-X, it would on the market as Tri-X.
Also, that part of the discussion rests on the assumption that the film Freestyle is selling is, in fact, Tri-X. Do we really know that it is? In the retail grocery market, many name-brand producers also make the store-band products that sit on shelves. Those store-band products often differ in some fashion from the name-brand lines. I.e., for the sake of argument, it's corn in the Green Giant can, and it's corn from Green-Giant in the store-brand can, but it isn't necessarily the same corn harvested from the same sources and produced in exactly the same fashion.
Much of this debate really hinges on whether one believes that the speciality market for film -- pro photographers, artists, and people who haunt these and similar venues -- is large enough to sustain production of consumer-grade film by large corporations like Kodak, Fuji and even Ilford.
My position is that it isn't. So, I'd argue that at some future undetermined date Fuji and Kodak will drop everything they consider consumer-grade film. Ilford's line will be rationalized, i.e., shrink. Fuji and Kodak, depending on who or what owns them at the time, may boost prices on pro films and keep going with those. Or, not. The key notion to understand is that the future of film at Kodak, and probably Fuji, is out of the hands of people who might want film to continue. It's in the hands of people who are obligated to squeeze the biggest profit out of the corporation.
We can debate on when to schedule film's funeral. But, I think there is little argument that film is becoming increasingly invisible in mainstream retail channels in the U.S. New film cameras have been invisible for years now. If someone wants to take up film photography, they need to buy from speciality suppliers.
[EDIT: Chris, I don't think people are arguing that film "MUST" die, in the sense that they are calling for its demise. However, it seems a futile exercise to deny that film is vanishing from the consciousness of mainstream consumers and, hence, from the shelves of the stores where they shop. Speciality films may well survive for some years in a specialty market, selling to pros who can pass costs along and to some enthusiasts.]
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btgc
Veteran
I just realized, what wgerrard said - " New film cameras have been invisible for years now. If someone wants to take up film photography, they need to buy from speciality suppliers."
That's true, same as I don't know a single person who would reject film photography because film gear isn't sold in street shop.
Boys and girls, world isn't as it were 20 years ago! This days we buy online even batteries and this matters a lot. While there will be shipping services on this planet, goodies will move from one side of globe to another. Cameras, film, chemicals or digital gear - everything moves forth and back, so only thing we should think about are funds to get what we plan to use. Even if I see film in local store I mostly order online because silly economics locally has inflated rents and taxes which result in laughably high prices. Thanks to global village effect, I can not worry about them and wait couple of years when expensive film will be given away for free, until that using film from Net stores.
While you generated several pages in thread, I developed film and scanned it to see what's worth printing. I don't have plans for next decades regarding film because no one knows what will happen then. Instead I celebrate this day, availability of film and how great way of making photographs it is. I have no idea about sensor banding and how CMOS differs from CCD, I just don't have time to read about this. When times will turn, I'll look what camera market has to offer.
That's true, same as I don't know a single person who would reject film photography because film gear isn't sold in street shop.
Boys and girls, world isn't as it were 20 years ago! This days we buy online even batteries and this matters a lot. While there will be shipping services on this planet, goodies will move from one side of globe to another. Cameras, film, chemicals or digital gear - everything moves forth and back, so only thing we should think about are funds to get what we plan to use. Even if I see film in local store I mostly order online because silly economics locally has inflated rents and taxes which result in laughably high prices. Thanks to global village effect, I can not worry about them and wait couple of years when expensive film will be given away for free, until that using film from Net stores.
While you generated several pages in thread, I developed film and scanned it to see what's worth printing. I don't have plans for next decades regarding film because no one knows what will happen then. Instead I celebrate this day, availability of film and how great way of making photographs it is. I have no idea about sensor banding and how CMOS differs from CCD, I just don't have time to read about this. When times will turn, I'll look what camera market has to offer.
Pickett Wilson
Veteran
Well, Bill, Freestyle says it is made in the US. Let's count the US film makers who have B&W film