Bye bye Kodak Slides

[Larry Bolch]

End of the road for chromes.

Kodak discontinues three colour reversal films [update] - British Journal of Photography

 

[Brian Moore]

Sad,...but no surprise, really.

 

[Hamish Gill]

I was chatting to someone from a film supplier the other day, he had high hopes that Kodak might sort them selve out regarding film supply... Aparently it is one line of their products that they continue to make profit out of! ... I guess slides are just not as popular!

 

[Brian Moore]

The last time I shot slides and had them developed was in Dec 2010, just before Dwaine's stopped processing Kodachrome.

 

[Larry Bolch]

The writing has been on the wall for more than a decade. Even when top management had good ideas they diffused on the way down through layers of management bureaucracy to be poorly implemented—if implemented at all. Thom Hogan wrote a well reasoned and thoughty piece on it today.

http://www.bythom.com/

Interestingly, while Kodak has been self-destructing, Fujifilm has been doing just fine. The company highly diversified even before digital cameras. While it builds a sustaining line of me-too P&S cameras, in the past year or two has been coming out with some very interesting and innovative designs. Their film cameras and lenses were mostly sold to the industry, but now they are coming up with cameras for mere mortals, either filling slots that had no competitors (X100, X-Pro1) or building top-of-the-genre cameras (X10, X-S1).

 

[Larry Bolch]

I was chatting to someone from a film supplier the other day, he had high hopes that Kodak might sort them selve out regarding film supply... Aparently it is one line of their products that they continue to make profit out of! ... I guess slides are just not as popular!

Among consumers, prints by far outnumbered slides. For publication, chromes were the standard medium, whether slides or larger formats.

However, publications embraced digital from the beginning. My last magazine assignments were shot with my classic Nikon Coolpix 990, and delivered across the pond by e-mail back around 2000-2002. I designed a number of presentations during the early 1990—slide-shows—which were mostly done in software, and output to a film recorder.

Even then, some were fully digital from creation in software to presentation—using a digital projector. Two huge accounting firms were merging, and the managers were getting together to explain the departments and structures of their companies. The other company came in with an overhead projector and very few and very crude slides. My clients ordered a slick and flowing presentation with the best colour, design and typography I could produce. It really made the other guys look stone-age.

 

[Chris Dodkin]

I guess that leaves Fuji with the market then - It'll be odd if Kodak disappears from the scene completely - all those childhood memories of yellow and red signs at the chemist, and at every gift shop.