Wonderful news from Ilford for us film shooters!

[bmattock]

I guess you didn't read Tom A's post on page 1 about Kodak's state of the art film coating facility they built.

They announced it on 25 Feb 2002. They (foolishly) did not think digital was going to be a big thing then. It was probably fortuitous for us, as I'm sure the cost savings have enabled them to remain in the B&W coating business for a longer period of time than they otherwise would.

They also heavily invested in five Chinese film manufacturing plants, putting nearly a billion dollars into upgrading and modernizing their film-coating plants.

I do not think they will be building any more plants.

 

[bmattock]

Right now the U.S. and elsewhere is experiencing what happens when unfettered capitalism rules banks, insurance companies, energy companies, a good part of our healthcare...and as long as the overall economy is doing well nobody complains all that much. For the most part health care in the rest of the planet is "socialized medicine"! They have better healthcare than the U.S.

"Communist" is a loaded word. Right now I don't think that any "communist" countries of note still exist. "Red China" is now our biggest trading partner. If China makes a decent film why not use it? And they now have a stock market, share holders, all that good stuff. Pretty hard to hang the Communist tag on them.

My point was that railing against Kodak for being a corporation that follows the law is kind of like pissing against the wind for distance. If you have a problem with how Kodak does business, your problem is not with Kodak but with how our system works. There are other places that do not practice our brand of capitalism, call them what you like. Go live in jelly donutstan if that sounds better than communist absurdistan.

 

[gb hill]

I can think of several manufacturers over the years who have released a newly engineered model of something or other ... then gone toes up shortly after.

How good their production facilities may be means nothing if they can't sell enough of it (film) to return or justify their investment.

I'm not taking sides with Bill or anyone here ... I just retain a degree of skepticism that makes me wary of 'off the cuff' statistics. 🙂

We have a manufacturing facility almost in my backyard built 4 years ago called Dell Computers. 2 weeks ago they decided to shut it down end of year putting 900 out of work. They decided to retool a plant in Mexico. No doubt Kodak could do the same. Can you imagine Tri-X made in Checkoslovakia.

 

[slm]

Because it is meaningless, taken by itself. The temperature today was nearly 70 degrees, up 50% from yesterday. Clearly, it is springtime. Nevermind that tomorrow the temperature will be dropping again.

Metrics are useless unless fitted to a curve that indicates a trend. And the longer the delta, the more accurate the trend line tends to be.



Cool. I seriously considered the 7D when I bought my *ist DS. The 7D is a fine camera.

Well, they did say it was a measure over a year, no?
I guess I don't simply dismiss things like that. Same way I don't dismiss Kodak Q3 results, any of the electronic giant results (Canon, Sony)...

 

[wlewisiii]

eh, all I'm trying to say is that I fully expect 90% or more of film mfgs to be gone in the long run. So what?

I also expect that, given real world capitalism, there will still be one or more mfgrs who will try to exploit the niche that is film. Foma and Ilford are, currently, in the best position to do so while followed closely by Fuji (can you say "Giri"? (Fuji's president has stated that they have a "duty" (one way to translate giri ) to provide film to those who have purchased a film cameras from their company. This is a factor that Wall Street can not comprehend. Japanese culture is different from the west - we tend to forget that at times.)) with the rest a fair distance back though Kodak has made a strong grab for that niche again with Tmax2 and Ektar.

It would actually make me very happy if Kodak were one of the long term winners as Plus-X and Ektar are my favorite films these days.

Bill, I don't think of it as a war either. I do think that if I am looking at it with too rosy a view then, perhaps, you might be looking at it from too harsh a point of view. The reality is, as always, somewhere between us.

William

 

[degruyl]

I also expect that, given real world capitalism, there will still be one or more mfgrs who will try to exploit the niche that is film. Foma and Ilford are, currently, in the best position to do so while followed closely by Fuji (can you say "Giri"? (Fuji's president has stated that they have a "duty" (one way to translate giri ) to provide film to those who have purchased a film cameras from their company.

Fuji has something else going for it: a lock on the Japanese film market. (not to mention the best slide film ever made).

They will probably continue, especially if they said they will continue. Unlike an american / western public corporation.

They have taken up slack where poloroid and kodak have let product lines go, I expect this to continue.

 

[bmattock]

Well, they did say it was a measure over a year, no?
I guess I don't simply dismiss things like that. Same way I don't dismiss Kodak Q3 results, any of the electronic giant results (Canon, Sony)...

People who look at one year 'trends' lose money in the stock market. One year (or one quarter) does not a trend make. The overall trend for film photography is down. CIPA, the Japanese camera manufacturer's association, stopped tracking silver halide based cameras some time ago - they simply fell off a cliff, sales-wise. Film sales by the remaining film manufacturers are down 30% more or less year-on-year world-wide, and that was before the current economic meltdown. That's a trend. I can fit the data to a curve and make a reasonable set of assumptions. Your one-year, one-company data point doesn't stand up to scrutiny.

 

[pakeha]

quote
Go live in jelly donutstan if that sounds better than communist absurdistan.

Hey, this is really funny, did you get this from the Simpsons?😀

 

[vdonovan]

Al ... the day we can't buy Tri-X anywhere on the planet .. we'll know it's over! 🙁

The end is near! I mentioned in another post that when I asked for Tri-X at the big camera stores in Auckland, New Zealand, I was told "they don't make it anymore."

 

[pakeha]

Do not expect too much from Aucklanders, try Wellington next time.

 

[David Hughes]

We seem to overlook the fact that Kodak were/are a huge firm geared up to run their factory 24 hours of the day every day of the year. And they turned out squillions of feet of film for the - then - huge market. I can imagine the problem if the current output is (say) a quarter of what it was; do they run for three months of the year and then mothball the factory and their workers or what?

As the market shrinks it gets difficult for them to run the factory as it was designed and so fairly drastic measures will be called for.

Smaller firms will have less problems adjusting their output. It's like comparing a 3 mile long oil tanker to a rowing boat in terms of where they can go and how they manoeuvre.

By the way, I other wonder if there are other firms making film. It isn't only Kodak, Fuji and Ilford. I know some of the German film have gone but wonder if there are smaller firms making old fashioned films and papers for B&W, litho and so on.

Regards, David

 

[sevo]

People who look at one year 'trends' lose money in the stock market. One year (or one quarter) does not a trend make. The overall trend for film photography is down. CIPA, the Japanese camera manufacturer's association, stopped tracking silver halide based cameras some time ago - they simply fell off a cliff, sales-wise.

What you do persistently seem to forget is the huge size to which film photography had grown by the nineties - it was not only one mass market but several. Computer typesetting and composing and offset print technology increased the amount of imagery in commercial applications by a full magnitude over the course of the last two decades of the 20th century. And almost anybody human and able to afford spending $5 on a important family event became at least a occasional user of a disposable camera.

That is over, and will never return again - nobody in his right mind will use film on cheap and fast junk photography, when it is almost free to take delete and forget a digital image.

But there are enough applications beyond that to leave a market with millions of high-profile users behind - photography is among the top five technologies in the art market. And in a world where reenactment hobbyists manage to keep muzzleloader gunsmiths and old aircraft spare part makers afloat, even the purely retro hobbyist aspect of film photography would sustain a small industry.

CIPA does not track the fine art brush industry or sales of oil paints and canvas either - nonetheless that segment is stable and artists materials are available in every bigger town, even without resorting to mail order.

We'll see which parts of the photography industry manage to transform into a similar trade - Kodak does at least try, but Fuji has more luck with the conditions on its home market. Besides, neither look too well compared to the black and white specialists, who already lost their mass market around 1990, when the press agencies started to default to colour and are already past that transformation.

 

[sevo]

By the way, I other wonder if there are other firms making film. It isn't only Kodak, Fuji and Ilford. I know some of the German film have gone but wonder if there are smaller firms making old fashioned films and papers for B&W, litho and so on.

They aren't even that small - Filmotec (a Orwo successor) and Agfa Materials still do exist, and while they aren't selling consumer photographic film themselves any more, they still do produce it for third party brands (e.g. Maco/Rollei).

And their industrial future is not that grim. Tthere still is a very relevant trade in microfilm - the entire bank sector uses direct laser print to microfilm to archive its accounting, and will continue to do so for a very long time, as any successor technology would have to prove its archival safety for at least the three decades of legally required storage. And archives would need even longer term proof of any more economical immediately readable printing and storage technology before they'd dare to switch - what with the current experience that true, fully compatible CD devices already aren't made any more, archivists dislike digital more than ever, and won't ever again store on a technology that has not existed at least as long as the mandatory storage period. So it is fairly safe to bet that at least one bulk commercial application of gelatin silver film will be around longer than we all will live...

Sevo

 

[Pickett Wilson]

"Fuji's president has stated that they have a "duty" (one way to translate giri ) to provide film to those who have purchased a film cameras from their company."

Yeah, Fuji has made promises before. They were the last company that made process film that newspapers used to shoot pages and make negatives from. The newer technology is CTP (computer to plate), a digital technology. Two years ago they announced that they "had stopped" producing the film. It idled my newspapers two presses and forced us - and most other small papers - eventually (bought up as much film as we could while it was still in the pipeline) to contract with large dailies to print our paper because the cost of new presses and CTP equipment was prohibitive.

It is not in a companies interest to announce their intent to bail before they do so. Kodak had just announced some new B&W paper before they pulled out of that market.

 

[NickTrop]

It's not stable with Fuji and Kodak, though. Both are continuing declines quarter over quarter.

True - but they're, I assume, are talking about color film. Relax, folks. The consumer color film business is largely dead - kept afloat largely by disposable cameras in conjunction with the 35mm movie film production facilities. Ilford is a black and white film company. That's an entirely different market - hobbiests, artists, pros. If anything, digital draws people in to photography, and some of those are branching out into traditional/black and white processing.

 

[Al Kaplan]

From the retail drug store standpoint film is a great draw. You make one visit to drop off, a second to pick up, and probably buy something else on at least one of those trips.

 

[wgerrard]

It's entirely possible for film sales to enjoy a positive bump in the midst of a long-term downturn. That's a common experience in all industries.

So, both sides can be correct, in their own fashion. A slice of the data look good, but the whole pie is looking not so good.

I am sure that there will be, for a very long time, a group of people who wish to use film. I'm one of them. Is that number going to stabilize at a level sufficient to sustain film production? Who knows? However, an argument can be made that large corporation like Fuji and Kodak, with revenue coming in from a variety of non-film products, might be in a position to sustain film production longer than smaller firms devoted exclusively to film. Bill's point about stockholder demands is absolutely correct, though. Kodak, et al, will not put the corporation at risk to save film.

 

[Pickett Wilson]

Kodak's problem is that they are bleeding money overall and have been bleeding money overall for a long time. It's possible the company will fail completely, regardless of the film/digital equation. Their film profits aren't sufficient to offset the overall loss from all other segments. They have pretty much been surviving by constant cost cutting.

 

[lawrence]

We have a manufacturing facility almost in my backyard built 4 years ago called Dell Computers. 2 weeks ago they decided to shut it down end of year putting 900 out of work. They decided to retool a plant in Mexico. No doubt Kodak could do the same. Can you imagine Tri-X made in Checkoslovakia.

It's called the "Czech Republic" and, yes, I can imagine Tri-X being made there as they already produce quite a range of monochrome film at the FOMA factory.

 

[slm]

Your one-year, one-company data point doesn't stand up to scrutiny.

It does for that one company, to their context.

Another thought comes to mind, Ilford (Harman) have no obligation to release news or numbers (they're not public AFAIK). I would believe their motivation for releasing information is quite different than a public company.

And one more thought comes to mind, refusing to buy a product from a company for whatever reason is the way the "system" you mentioned in another post, works. It's the clearest message a consumer can send to a company, by speaking with their dollars. Myself, I buy products from all three (Kodak/Ilford/Fuji). Think my few hundred dollars a year are speaking to them?