R.I.P. Kodachrome

frank wrote:

Right. Its not only Kodachrome, friend of mine does prints from
slides. Can't get it shipped from NY due to shipper restrictions, he
finally found a source in the UK to do it.

Last I checked, the UK had a fairly active community of photgraphers who
thought that silver based photgraphy was something worth doing. My expectation
is that most of the labs that print slides will just scan them and do digital
print.

If it's done on silver based paper then it is far better than an inkjet print.
I doubt that it's as good as a direct optical print, but that won't last
forever, scanning and printing technology keep getting better.


Why not spin off the film and paper business to some subsidiary
instead of killing it and saying we're going digital and producing the
crap cameras nobody uses.

They did. Remember when they went from the old Plus-X, etc to the new? What they
did was cut a deal with Lucky in China where Lucky bought the old production
equipment, formulas, training and assistance from Kodak. Kodak modified what
products they kept to be produced on the their existing equipment which was
set up for t-grained color film.

Unfortunately it seems that Lucky did not perform as expected, at least outside
of China, and their export film is nothing like the Kodak film. Kodak pulled
out of that deal.

Personaly, I don't think that made a change at all, Lucky produced mediocre
film because that was what they were able to produce. Eventually they will
produce film as good as or better than Kodak's, but it will take time.

If you figure that it takes 5 years for them to catch up, in 10 they will
be producing a better product at a lower price than Kodak.


It seems their business model is make it hard to find, drop processors
and plants, then say, there's no demand and kill it. My town has no
camera store. Its that way in lots of places. Only place to buy film
is Wal Mart except online. You have a much selection there if you're
the last guy to get to the pile of C rations....

That was not Kodak's doing. Camera stores closed down because people no
longer went to them to buy a camera and film. They bought them online
and if they wanted to buy them in person, they went to Wal-Mart because
they were cheap.

It was not the first time, I remember when K-Mart started selling Canon
AE-1 Program cameras for $115, and suddenly everyone had an SLR.

By the late 1980's most Camera chain stores in the US were selling extended
warranties as their main source of income. The market for cameras and film
had become so cutthroat that they had to meet or beat any price including
the discounters just to make a sale.

Geoff.

--
Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel N3OWJ/4X1GM