Kodak Film

Photographers are still c-dacking with Kodak film. Yesterday a customer of ours bought 55 rolls of Portra 160 for a trip to Australia, and it was in 120 roll film. At £229.00 it did not quite match our biggest Kodak film sale of 2011 with a value of £1098.00. However, this is not an isolated sale and it is not just students who are sticking with celluloid. Another regular buys Ilford HP5 and Provia 400x at the rate of about 30 a month. This customer tried digital but returned to film for the quality. Don't be too quick to snap the door shut on a truly innovative photo company.
Fujifilm unlike Kodak has embraced the digital market in many ways from building a range of innovative cameras and sensors to getting involved in large format inkjet printing. In addition it makes top quality lenses for companies such as Hasselblad, sells pharmaceuticals like skin creams used cosmetically, Two years ago Fujifilm's revenue from imaging was $4.2bn half the level of 2005 but in 2010 it made six times that amount from other businesses. More than two years after the demise of Polaroid Fuji still makes an instant analogue camera the Instax and the 20 image film to go with it and it is still selling!
Even as an ordinary consumer I was ahead of the trend, I first used a Casio digital camera in 1993. At that time I faithfully wrote a monthly diary on an Amstrad word processor which is long gone sadly stolen with its discs. That month I wrote: "Today I have seen the future of photography."

See also:
The Sunday Observer January 22nd 2012
Could Kodak's demise have been averted? http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/jan/22/john-naughton-kodak-lessons
Kodak Advance Warning: Mr McNaughton writes:
"What's not often appreciated is that it was Kodak that invented the digital camera – in 1975. And four years after that a Kodak executive named Larry Matteson produced a report that predicted, in some detail, how different parts of the market would switch from film to digital, starting with government reconnaissance, moving on to professional photographyand finally the mass market, all by 2010. As it happened, Mr Matteson got the time-frame wrong by about five years, but apart from that he was spot-on."