Kodak - No more film

[Quillan]

Seeing the post about digital camera's reminded me. Kodak have announced today that it will stop making film for personal use i.e. the likes of you and me. On the TV it didn't say exactly when (or perhaps I missed it).

Q

[A_Redman]

My reading was that they were going to stop investing in new analogue film development as opposed to stopping production. Not surprising in view of growth of digital and chemical limits on how much further analogue film can go.

Announcement seems to have come via heavy end of financial press rather than being controlled by their marketing department.

Extract below was from aphtography web site

read on a German Web Site (http://www.spiegel.de, alas only in German) that Kodak has today announced that they will stop investing in new film products.

Kodak has decided to invest "several billion dollars" into the development of digital products and decided to drop the budgets for developing new analog film products. So what wevwe got today is what we will keep...unless of course they fail all the way.

Apprently sales have been receding for the past four _years_ as digital photography took its share. The share price has suffered to the tune of a 70% loss. Kodak had hoped that the growth of developing markets like China would compensate for the losses in Europe and the US. But this seems to have been wrong, they seem to jump directly into the digital arena.

The German article is based on an article in Thursdays Wall Street Journal, apparently there are high risks with this new strategy, mainly that the digital camera market is already well carved up between companies like HP, Canon, Sony and Seiko-Epson.

If this goes wrong apparently than that would be it for Kodak altogether, because their financial situation is precarious and Moody rating agency has repeatedly lowered their credit ratings.