As for Ilford, PanF+ is a beautiful film, even if nothing else they make really captivates me. They’ve been pulling some crazy pricing tricks on HP5+ lately, though (2 for the price of one, 3 for the price of 1.5) which has led to me shooting a considerable amount of it. When, really, I guess I should be supporting Kodak instead…

The former could never get its act together with digital photography. For example, they offered Photo CDs made from your 35mm film reels. This would have been a great transitional technology, but they used an obscure format that no one supported rather than a simple raw format and JPEG which was just coming into popular use. They could have built something like Digital Darkroom, but they were locked into the chemical processing model.

My first digital camera was a Kodak, and it wasn’t bad for its day. It even offered photo sharing online. Again, they were hurt because they didn’t understand the software aspects of the business. Their support software was clunky. It didn’t offer real asset management. My impression was that they made an effort, but it went against the corporate grain. They thought of the camera and accesories as the teaser and the money in film and processing, not the other way around. Like Detroit, it took a long time for them to “get” the new technology. In their case, too long.

Be that as it may: I concur with the hope that Kodak will at least licence the b&w emulsions. Film/digital pissing contests be damned: I know that digital is “better” for many applications. But I happen to like the craft of working in the darkroom. My prints are hand-made, with love and old equipment. From an artistic point of view, to me the “how” is just as important as the result.

So if someone decided, à la Impossible project, to pick up the recipe for original-strength Tri-X and coats it on film at small scale, yeah, I’ll buy a couple of hundred. In the meantime I’m stockpiling yellow boxes.

And D76 is pretty close to Ilford ID-11.

Some producers and directors still insist on film, even for TV shows, but every year I’m more amazed that the studios let them get away with it in these tight-budgeted times.

Harman has a fairly complete lineup in b/w, but nothing in color. Kodak has some nice recent color film developments (the new Portra line, Ektar, E100), and these could be valuable. Unfortunately Harman has an equivalent for every Kodak b/w product — HP5+ for Tri-X, FP4 for Plus-X, Delta for TMAX, XP2 for 400CN — and then more — the Kentmere films for low-cost b/w, PanF+, SFX… 

Efke/Adox/Maco/Rollei/whatever deal in a small line of fairly niche emulsions. I doubt they could afford license to, or even desire to pick up Kodak film. 

Foma has a small lineup of budget traditional emulsions. Similar situation to Efke/etc…

All a shame, because nothing else available now is quite like Tri-X. I’ll opine similarly once Fuji starts doing worse and Acros is threatened… 

Now is probably a good time to stock up on Tri-X, I guess. They already killed off Plus-X, and while they suggested that Tri-X is safe, that can only be true for as long as the company itself is afloat…

Even at the start most of their marketing was based on how cheap it was to print things at home with a Kodak printer. I think it was $.85 a print for most printers at the time. Kodak was something like $.65 a print. Our 1 hour photolab printed thing for $.34 and most of the internet/mail guys were doing it at between $.25 and $.10 a print. 

Only Ilford chemicals (then again, I like Ilford anyway…)

BTW , anyone who knows a source for 70mm B&W film with type 2 perforations.

Rodinal on the other hand…

There are other factors that make this seem logical. The modern digicam lives from batteries, but a Pentax K1000 with a 36 exposure roll can sit  in a closet for two years and be ready to go in an instant when you take it out. Battery? Yes – but only for the meter, and most shots can be done acceptably with a few simply exposure rules. The lack of a broad and solid battery and power infrastructure in the third world should – by this vision – slowed down the digital transition.

What destroyed this plan was the third world skipping over film entirely, and going straight to digital. This was likely helped along considerably by the cell phone market, which rapidly took over the cheapest digicam markets. When the camera moved from being a $100 item to a $5 option, people find a way to adapt to the other changes.

Ultimately, I’d say Moore’s law had the most to do with destroying Kodak. But even that could have been hard to see – the optics and mechanicals aren’t part of that equation.

But Kodak did deal in low-cost film point and shoots, though, so they should have known just how little it costs to make a camera body and inexpensive lens. Pair that with the plunging cost of the digital guts, and maybe, just maybe, someone could have seen the light.

But at the end of the day, Kodak was a process and chemicals company. The market was shifting to a place where you could create photographs and memories without process and chemicals. It takes a very tough minded company to admit that the future does not hold a place for them.

So what did you do at Eastman anyway?

Sounds like the exact same model where companies sell ink jet printers cheap and then sell expensive ink.

So even then (7 years ago or so) Kodak had lost or seriously cheesed off the entire back end of the business. The labs, pros, artists, press and what have that could have saved them. And they were just starting to seriously fuck up the digital end of the business. I had that same nostalgic pro-America love for Kodak as most people when I started at that place. Within 3 months (and ever since) I had a serious hard on for Fuji and wouldn’t touch Kodak with a 10 foot pole. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYW49bsiP4k

As a kid in the early 1970s, I made up a few batches myself.  D76, though, was just easier to buy at the local FedMart so I stopped making my own developer after my curiosity was satisfied.  It was not difficult.  If I really needed D76 now, I could make some. 

I expect that eventually someone will read some old photography magazines from the 1940s and 1950s, pull out a half-dozen easy-to-make formulas, make up a few test batches, and publish the results.  No doubt they’ll be lauded by the whole “let’s reinvent everything and pretend we’re pioneering geniuses” crowd as super-duper innovators.

Polaroid sold it all to the Impossible Project, who is cranking out film as fast as the can and making innovations in the product at the same time.

Kodak may just hand the reins over to Fuji or Ilford as well since there’s just not enough money in it for them to meet their current standard.  Hiring experts isn’t the issue, it’s more about “do we shutter some plants and keep a boutique line or just shutter them all and call it a day?”