Kodak Selling It's Photographic Film Division

[Mitchell Dvoskin]

Rochester Star Gazette

Note the last paragraph:

It is in the midst of selling such lines of business as its photographic film and paper and document scanner operations to a United Kingdom pension fund

In the short term, this probably means nothing. In the longer term, I suspect no more research/development or enhancements for those product lines, and eventually they will be broken up and resold.

[momsne]

Eastman Kodak is now following a similar path to corporate oblivion that Polaroid took. I would not be surprised if a mainland Chinese company ends up buying Kodak's film business, to get control of the processes Kodak used to manufacture film. The handwriting was on the wall when Kodak decided about 8 years ago to get heavily into selling consumer printers for computers. No one makes money selling printers, the money is all in the consumables. There was no way Kodak could compete with HP, Canon and Brother in the printer business.

The Kodak corporate yard sale is about over, the patents have been sold, the real estate is going and time for Kodak to unload any unfunded pension obligations to the Federal PBGC as part of its bankruptcy. 30 years ago, Kodak had a waiting list of tens of thousands of people trying to get a job at Kodak. Now the only guys making a lot of money at Kodak are its bankruptcy attorneys.

It took a lot of incompetence to drive Kodak under, but the corporate honchos at Kodak were up to the task.

[Derek Gee]

You missed a very important point, Kodak isn't selling the business to just any old UK fund, they sold it to the KODAK UK Pension Fund in order to settle claims against it. In the short term, Kodak will continue to manufacture film for the new owners, and the new owners will control the marketing of the film. I doubt there will be any more additional R & D on film products that aren't directly related to the Motion Picture industry or converting digital images to film. Enjoy film while you still can and shoot a few rolls!

http://pdnpulse.com/2013/04/kodak-turns ... -plan.html" target="_blank" target="_blank

Derek

[David Alp]

Kodak have sadly already made Kodachrome obsolete. I used to make lovely super 8mm home movies in stunning colour! Kodachrome had a charm all of its own. It was almost like Technicolor. Colours were stunningly bright and overwhelmingly rich, especially red, blue and green.

Kodak carried on manufacturing Super 8, but they stopped developing the film in about 2006. From that year on we had to use a developing plant in Kansas, and that became the very last place in the world that developed Kodachrome. Anyway, they finally stopped developing Kodachrome in about 2011. So that was that! 100 years of beautiful Kodachrome colour photographs/films no longer available in the whole world! It was such a sad day when they processed the final colour roll of film. I still have several rolls of Super 8 film (sound and silent) which have never been opened, they are still in their boxes. Totally useless now! I emailed the place in Kansas that developed Kodachrome and they advised me that YES they still could be developed, but they would come back to me in black and white!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJPgshLhQBw" target="_blank

[Derek Gee]

Kodak have sadly already made Kodachrome obsolete. I used to make lovely super 8mm home movies in stunning colour! Kodachrome had a charm all of its own. It was almost like Technicolor. Colours were stunningly bright and overwhelmingly rich, especially red, blue and green.

Indeed! Kodachrome has been obsolete for about 12-15 years, after both Kodak & Fuji developed E-6 based films that were superior in both color and smaller grain than Kodachrome. The new E-6 chrome films also gave superior color on cloudy days, when Kodachrome had an UGLY gray cast to it. The only thing that Kodachrome had going for it at the end was better dark storage longevity.

Kodak carried on manufacturing Super 8, but they stopped developing the film in about 2006. From that year on we had to use a developing plant in Kansas, and that became the very last place in the world that developed Kodachrome. Anyway, they finally stopped developing Kodachrome in about 2011. So that was that! 100 years of beautiful Kodachrome colour photographs/films no longer available in the whole world! It was such a sad day when they processed the final colour roll of film. I still have several rolls of Super 8 film (sound and silent) which have never been opened, they are still in their boxes. Totally useless now! I emailed the place in Kansas that developed Kodachrome and they advised me that YES they still could be developed, but they would come back to me in black and white!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJPgshLhQBw" target="_blank" target="_blank

It was sad that Kodak was no longer willing to manufacture the special dyes for the Kodachrome process, but they gave everybody fair warning that processing would no longer be available after 2011. Also, very few people were using it. When I polled my camera club, NOBODY had shot any 35mm Kodachrome in 3-4 years, even the whiners who complained it was gone!!! (I been warning the club for a few years prior to the end that now was the time to buy Kodachrome if you wanted it to stick around.) I had used up all my 35mm Kodachrome, and finished my last roll of Super-8 sound film well in time to beat the deadline for processing.

Derek