Changing tide: the film market

[james_jenoptik1]

I've learnt more today trawling this site than I have for a while off

travelling.

 

Enough of the chit-chat. Film looks like it's becoming a specialist

niche market.

 

Ok - after the bad news about Tech Pan. When Kodak suggested using

TMax instead of Tech Pan I had to laugh. Psychotic or what? TMax looks

nothing like Tech Pan. Kodak once again demonstrate that they really

don't belong in the modern era of film photography.

 

Who's left then....

 

1. Fuji (nice company - great cameras/lenses for the pro market

and great range of film. No Tech Pan equivalent though)

 

2. Konica Minolta (smaller? than Fuji, some good film, some rather

bland stuff. Great lenses, not so great cameras)

 

3. Agfa (well, they've kind of bitten the dust, searching around

for someone to buy them out. They'll be on Ebay next

thing we know).

 

4. Ilford (I really like these people. They do everything I like,

except Delta film and SFX)

 

5. Lucky! Film (The rising star?)

 

6. Unlucky! others (Fomapan/Macophot and other obscure European

films?)

 

7. Kodak (no brainer - film sales hijacked by their own management)

 

Who are you going to support?

[claudia__]

i think unless you print strictly in the darkroom it won't matter as long as something is left. film that is. so much can be done to a scanned neg for digital output that lots of this film won't be missed. i am learning to live without apx25 as i watch my supply dwindle. pan F plus isn't so bad when you learn to work with it.

[ronald_moravec1]

Go with Ilford until they waffle. Kodak is a great company, but their cost accountants are cutting their own throats. T Max film looks good in D76 as long as it is not overdeveloped. Learn to handle it and it will reward you. Xtol works well for T max, but has its own problems. T max liquid will give a sharp grainy neg.

 

Ilford and Efke seem to want to be in the film business. Kodak will probably sell their formulas to someone else and someone else will make them, maybe even in Kodak`s facility. Then Kodak will have to compete with Epson, Cannon, and Nikon. Paper your walls with Kodak stock then.

[Andrew in Austin]

Just used up the last of my VC Pan 120 last month. It's spot in the fridge has been replaced with XP-2. Once the APX25 is gone I'll try the Elke and compare it with the Pan F I have. Someone once posted that Lucky offers a VC Pan substitute. I doubt it, but I'll give it try.

[james_jenoptik1]

Quiche,

 

I have 2 rolls of APX25 left before my bacon's fried. After that, I won't buy a discontinued film and try and cling on to yesteryear. Now that would be really backward. I've learnt my lesson with APX25....

 

Scanning and digitised prints from film is great, although it's only great because of the quality and characteristics of the film which enables it to be scanned and printed. Any luck with scanning and printing Pan F Quiche?

 

I'm wondering whether it's in the interest of film users to start thinking about supporting at least one film company with a chance of pulling through.

[al_divenuti]

>>Then Kodak will have to compete with Epson, Cannon, and Nikon. Paper your walls with Kodak stock then.

 

Already are and doing quite well in the US market. I didn't give Kodak a chance in hell when they announced their new digital strategy, but so far I'm wrong. At least here's one market where Kodak is trouncing Fuji...

 

Konica-Minolta is fading fast. Acquisition fodder if this continues. Stupid merger, to say the least.

 

Kon

[rowland_mowrey]

Maybe I should have a yard sale.

 

I have 20 rolls of 120 TriX pan (the original from the 70s (well, almost original)).

 

I have over 40 rolls of VPS II from the same era, as well as RXP 120, some misc 220, and some Panatomic X.

 

I also have about 200 sheets of Super XX. All of this has been frozen at 0 deg F from the time I got it and is still good. I just took out 25 sheets of the Super XX and used it this summer.

 

The Royal X Pan is getting foggy, but the speed is still there. It makes fair but grainy prints.

 

I have some Ektar 25 and 1000 as well.

 

Hmmm, come to think of it I probably have a C22 kit, some Ektaprint 3 kits, some Versatol, and some TriChem packs in my DR.

 

Its fun to be a collector of discontinued products.

 

Ron Mowrey

[al_divenuti]

And Ilford is doomed long-term. Not a tuppence in the film ops since their buyout from International Paper by a London buyout firm 5 years back. Since then it's been wave after wave after market-rejected inkjet products based on licensed, rather than in-house technology. You may not smell the rot yet, but it's there.

 

Fuji is part of a huge industrial conglomerate. They're starting to fall behind in the digital camera market(Looking at the US market Fuji went from being a close #3 to Canon & Sony to about #6 in two and a half years)and may concentrate on developing components for camera phones where they could be a volume leader. If not, I expect that its parent conglomerate will just shutter the business in the next decade or two or sell it off if a buyer can be found.

 

Kodak's problem isn't management - it's the investor community's mentality in the US equity markets. One breeds the other.

[rowland_mowrey]

Al;

 

IMHO, EK did not mis-estimate digital so much as it mis-estimated the rate of change of sales and the rate of change in prices on the open market. There is more to be said on this that I am not privy to but have hints of.

 

In any event, EK is now second after Sony here in the US in digital camera sales, so your info on Fuji is correct. That isn't too shabby.

 

The effects of digital have hit other companies very hard including Fuji, and most of the digital companies had no clue about color or even B&W technology when all of this started. Many of the companies had to ally with EK to 'learn' color printing methodology. When they learned enough, they terminated the agreements with EK.

 

Look at the history of 'alliances' EK had with Microsoft and HP to name a few. And how long they lasted.

 

Anyhow, Ilford and other companies are struggling to survive, and Konica had to merge with Minolta recently to keep afload, even though Konica is part of the Mitsubishi family.

 

Ron Mowrey

[james_jenoptik1]

Ok guys,

 

Trying to read between the lines -

 

Quiche is going to support sliced bread and Ilford. Ronald will only support Ilford and not sliced bread. But where are you going to get your Xtol mate? Kodak ain't going to be producing Technidol for Tech Pan much longer too...

 

Andrew - Ilford, Efke and Kodak (difficult choice, huh?)

 

And Rowland - it looks like you've set up your own warehouse! I'm impressed.

 

Tell me off if I got it all wrong. No.6 isn't bad for Fuji I guess.

[al_divenuti]

Yup,

 

EK runs around like a chicken with its head cut off. Fortunately, given the folks who run the place the head wasn't where the brain was...

 

Don't forget that EK is ever mindful of what happened to Polaroid. Those folks overestimated the uptake of the technology and became so cash strapped they could only address they low-end of the market where margins were lousy. They were the largest unit producers of digital cameras in the world when they went into receivership.

 

Kodak's early strategy ('95-'99) was actually pretty brilliant. They had their act together with DSLRs and beat Nikon and Canon to market. Nobody expected it to last, but they squeezed awesome margins out of those products for a few years. Naturally, there was some pain when Nikon and Canon got up to speed and their products were considerably less attractive.

 

Now Kodak is largely abandoning the DSLR market in favor of the low-mid consumer market. Olympus and Fuji would be wise to follow, IMO.

 

As for alliances that didn't last. Forget about Microsoft, HP, etc. - how about disc camera formats and APS!

 

And how's this for a prediction? Nikon (yes, Nikon) will not be an independent conern inside of three years. Its vaunted brand is diluted considerably once one considers that photographic equipment is now just another niche in consumer electronics. Throw in the fact that they are non-players in video and office equipment and its hard to see them generating the cash flow to keep them at the forefront. I was shocked to see they were #7 in the US market but it appears they simply are pricing themselves to extinction...

[rowland_mowrey]

Ummm, Al, what about the EK DCS /c and /n cameras with the largest of all 35 mm sensors, and a recent $1000 drop in price. That along with the good reviews makes me think that EK is still doing things right.

 

Anyhow, I don't care. If I had to, I could make TriX, Gold 400 or any of the other films. All I need do is use my memory, and have access to the couplers, hardeners, and all the other addenda. After all, I have made/coated most of them, so all thats left is having a coating machine. Maybe I should call Jim Browning. He has one and a big roll of support in his basement.

 

Hahahahah. See, I can 'roll my own'. All I need is about $5,000,000 in capital for equipment and chemistry. Or maybe I need more than that come to think of it. Hmmm. Well, anyhow I could do it if I really really needed it. Me and a couple of buddies, just like old Dynachrome.

 

Ron Mowrey

[bob fowler]

My current 35mm film stock in my film fridge: 3 100' rolls of the "old" Tri-X, 4 100' rolls of Plus-X, 2 100' rolls of APX-25, and at last count, 8 of the 55' boxes of Pan F+, and at least 60 36 exposure rolls of FP4+. Add to that at least 500 sheets of 4X5 VPSIII, and God-knows-how-many 120 rolls of E100S...

 

That should keep me happy for a little while! :-)

[jim_gifford]

<<All I need is about $5,000,000 in capital for equipment and chemistry. >>

 

Rowland, if your erstwhile employer really does abandon the market someday, you won't need $5 million. You'll be able to buy everything for more like $25,000 if you promise to haul it from Rochester or wherever to your own place of business.

 

Bonus: You'll probably find that pair of Ray-Bans you lost in the plant back in 1974.

 

Be well,

[michael_schiller]

I'll throw in my 2 cents. It certainly appears that the large players in the film market are

moving away from good old fashioned film, and toward digital. This includes Kodak, Ilford,

Fuji, etc.

 

It would seem to me that rather than switching from say Kodak film to Ilford film in hopes

of getting a film you know you'll be able to depend upon being there, I would go with the

small film houses like Forte, Forma, etc. The reason? Well the big guys are trying to be all

things to all people, and they're doing a terrible job of it. Film as we know it is going to

become a niche market, and if people start sending their business toward the smaller

houses, they'll be able to afford to stay in business, and grow, so we can be assured of a

good source of film for years to come, as these companies are small enough and

(hopefully) have a low enough overhead that they'll be able to turn a profit from a reduced

amount of film sales (as opposed to film sales from years ago) and so won't go looking to

get into everything under the sun, but will be happy making film for us.

 

I could be totally wrong in this idea, but I don't think I am.

[chris_waller]

I back Ilford. They produce an excellent range of materials and chemistry. Mind you, of late even they seem to be suffering an attack of cost-accountants. I now shoot the vast majority of my work on Delta 100, though I dev in Rodinal. Otherwise I use all Ilford chemistry except for Kodak Indicating stop and KRST. And I print everything on Ilford MG IV RC (and very occasionally FB). What I would love to see is Cooltone in Satin finish. Ilford have done a great deal to foster and support b+w photography in the past and I hope they don't forget their prime objective.

 

As for Lucky, I've just bought 18 rolls of SHD 100 to assess.

 

Kodak? I despair! Like so many other companies they talk about 'the business' but seem to forget that a business needs customers and they had legions of customers whom they seem to have abandoned in the rush for 'shareholder value'. For the company that made Verichrome Pan, Panatomic-X, 2475 Recording Film etc. they seem to have lost touch with their core customers.

 

Somebody will survive and I hope and pray it is Ilford.

[Andrew in Austin]

The times are definitely a changing. A little over a year ago big yellow moved all their B&W film manufacturing into a single plant. Hence, TXP -120 and TX now have a slight purple cast to the film base. I'm not an insider, so I wouldn't know if this cost saving measure actually worked out for EK.

 

The crux of the problem is color film sales, which have plummeted much faster than predicted. Inevitably, there will be some sort of shake up in the cards. I believe Agfa will be the first to go. The future just doesn't seem to bode well for this once proud photographic name.

 

So to answer the bleeding question, I'm migrating towards Ilford, with the hope that EK keeps a foot in the door, either on or off shore.

[al_divenuti]

Realistically, I think most of the major players are smoking crack if they think they can fetch large sums (perhaps any sum) for its film operations. Look at typical patterns in technology uptake. I have every reason to expect that developing countries will skip film altogether and simply use digital. Look at DVDs in the far east in the late 90s. Developing countries didn't stop to buy VCRs did they?

 

It would not shock me terribly to find that 10 years from now the last vestiges of C-41 processing are still to be found in the US, much the same as analog mobile phone technology is today.

 

The BIG problem here is that the capitalization needed to produce film is non-trivial. It's relatively easy for a mom & pop outift like Photographer's Formulary to produce chemistry but the investment to produce film would be a couple orders of magnitude greater. Look at Efke and Foma - essentially, they purchased fully-depreciated but functioning machinery from Adox (DuPont)and Agfa, respectively.

 

Not to bore folks with the nitty-gritty of corporate finance but there's a BIG bugbear that every CFO addresses called EVA (Earnings Value Add). Essentially, any thing you spend shareholder (or creditor) money on has to fetch a better return than some 'standard' investment return they could get elsewhere. Analysts monitor EVA like a fly monitors poopy - you simply can't shy away from it.

 

If you're wondering what killed of Verichorme Pan it was because EK simply determined that the line would not be sufficiently profitable to justify use of shareholder money to rebuild the produciton infrastructure. VPs production infrastructure was 40-50+ years old at the time of its discontinuation and in desperate need of refurbrishment. But somebody determined (rightly or wrongly) that the operational profitability wouldn't match the investment required to keep the line going. Also, film production machinery just doesn't have the residual value it used to have, so depreciation that helps your cash flow takes a hit too.

[lex_jenkins]

Worse comes to worst, I'll dump all of my film cameras, buy a large format camera with the necessary adapter and roll my own glass plates, chemistry and paper.

 

The "convenience" of oil, watercolor and acrylic paints didn't kill off egg tempera. It just turned the medium into the highly specialized pursuit of fanatics who are more talented than their forebears.

[oskar_ojala]

Lex, I don't necessarily agree, good painting is not easy to come by and many "masters" had better technique than the current crop of painters. When photography won't offer anything to me anymore, I'll probably have to get my oil skills up to snuff... ;-)

[Andrew in Austin]

Al, you seem to have the "chicken little" syndrome down pat.

 

Maybe you need the question rephrased to "Who are you going to support in the mean time?"

[rowland_mowrey]

As always there is truth and fiction in some of the posts.

 

Firsly, I live about 15 minutes from Kodak park, so I wouldn't have to haul the coating machines etc very far. In fact, I might just commute again, and the parking lot sure would be empty now. Why, I could even park in the executive lot next to the building.

 

Secondly, All EK films can be coated at any coating station, so there is no question of obsolescence. The Verichrome Pan line was not a production line per-se. It could have been coated on the Vericolor or Portra machines with no problem, just a small decrease in efficiency and also the lost time in coating Portra or whatever.

 

Remember that these machines in Rochester, Colorado, Canada, Harrow, Chalon, etc run 24/7 right now for the existing products. That includes down time for maintenance. Seeing film or paper being coated is an awesome experience when you consider that it will be slit and chopped down into little 35mm or 120 rolls. Especially when you see a fork lift pull up with a 5000 ft roll of support that is over a meter wide.

 

So, it is a matter of satisfying the shareholders, but not so much a matter of obsolescence of the line, but rather the obsolescence of the product. The old verichrome pan was designed with K grain technology and old hardeners and stabilizers, the newer films have better emulsions, hardeners and stabilizers for keeping. You have to keep that in perspective too.

 

Along with that is that some of the old films used mercury or cadmium, and EK has eliminated all of these heavy metals from production thereby making it impossible to make some of the old produts from an environmental standpoint.

 

As I said elsewhere, making products for you involves a series of tradeoffs.

 

Ron Mowrey

[roger_hicks1]

Dear Ron,

 

"My mind is made up: do not confuse me with the facts."

 

Thanks for one of the few rational analyses in this thread.

 

Cheers,

 

Roger

[lex_jenkins]

Oskar, no argument from me. Contemporary oil painting technique, in particular, has suffered from the introduction of quick drying media, which appeal to impatient beginners. I know of at least one highly paid portraitist who tried the stuff and had to redo a portrait that began sloughing off. He returned to traditional, proven media afterward.

 

With a few notable exceptions (da Vinci's sadly among them) much of the work from acknowledged masters remains in rather good shape, most with crackling that's noticeable only up close. And Diego Velázquez may have had the best archival technique of any oil painter I know of - the works of his I've seen have virtually no cracks or visible flaws after four centuries.

 

But I believe that today's egg tempera painters, whether working in the traditional iconic style or something of their own making (some of which is rather esoteric and seems directed mostly toward other egg tempera artists, an odd bunch of cultists and semoticians) are far better artists than those who originally worked in the medium. For one thing the original egg tempera artists hadn't yet learned to transfer the sense of dimensions and perspectives from life to their paintings. At the risk of blasphemy, some of them had all the subtlety of a South Park cartoon.

 

Anyway, I'm not worried about the disappearance of film. If forced to return to the forest to pick mushrooms, chew bones and chant incantations in order to learn the ways of glass plate photography, well, so be it. I guess I just won't be bracketing my shots any more.

[Andrew in Austin]

I'm leaning towards "tintypes", now that Lex brought it up. Maybe get an RV to use as a darkroom, follow the rodeos in the summer and hit the state fair in the fall. I'll miss enlargements, though.