Kodak retires Kodachrome

I got to reading the comments—silly, nearly all of them. The complaints fall into a few repetitive topics.

1. Kodak is abandoning their customers, therefore Kodak is stupid.

Got that backwards, folks: customers abandoned Kodachrome, therefore they are discontinuing a product they cannot sell profitably.

2. Kodak is capitulating to the fad for the "latest and greatest."

Kodak used to invent and market the "latest and greatest." In 1935, when Kodachrome hit the market, it was the latest thing. Kodak used to be a high-tech company. Granted, the pace of change has picked up. Granted, many are nostalgic for the old ways. But Moses did not bring Kodachrome with him to the Promised Land: the product was born 75 years ago and has now died. The problem is that Kodak was content to milk their cash cow, did not remain high tech.

3. Kodachrome captures colors and other details like the naked eye does.

No camera, no film "sees" what the human eye sees. No artist ever captured with pencil or brush what the human eye sees. So what? Enjoy them for what they are. You LIKE what Kodachrome captures. Fine. Let it go at that. (But don’t tell the Velvia fanatics that Kodachrome is better.)

4. You cannot produce colors in digital like you can in Kodachrome.

That’s at least debatable. Sure, it requires manipulation: digital images do not come out of the camera ready to be printed and hung in an art gallery. But they don’t come out of your film camera that way either. They require skilled development at a professional lab to bring the best out of the film. If Kodachrome really just captured “what was there,” it wouldn’t matter what kind of lab developed it, and I have never, ever heard a serious photographer maintain that.

With digital much of that skilled manipulation is done not by a lab but by the photographer with calibrated monitor, calibrated printer, Photoshop, plug-ins, etc. That is, the locus of labor has shifted. Many photographers may not want to do that manipulation, just as most film photographers did not have their own darkrooms. That’s a legitimate gripe—but an entirely different argument from saying “digital cannot do it.” I have seen far too many beautiful 30” x 40” prints done from digital to believe that “digital cannot do it.”

SnowDog,

I do tend to agree with you, at least in theory. A couple of years ago, I had a rush trip out West. I was not able to acquire enough film prior to leaving. I found myself in a small town in Montana, running low on film. I stopped at each and every store in the town (There was no Wal-Mart.) I was able to locate two (2!!!!!) rolls of Kodak color print film, out of 13 stores of various types. This was enough to tide me to another location, a large city, where I was able to stock up properly.

My point was (rant??) that legacy products are phased out before their time has passed, forcing you into the latest and greatest, even if it is not really. For example, have you noticed the declining stocks of any type or brand of 35mm film at any number of stores you could pick?

As to company profits, legacy products do not have R&D costs and the manufacturing equipment has long been amortized. Therefore, legacy products are the most profitable products a company could have.

Additionally, why alienate someone like me who will pay you a profit over and over, to make a one-time sale? It's ludicrous.

I don't believe the customer is always right. I've been in retail sales too long to buy into that one. However, I do believe the customer's money is always right. Business exists to make a profit. Why discontinue your most profitable products (legacy) to chase additional non-reoccurring types of sales? Even the argument of declining sales of a particular item is self-serving. Declining sales should prompt more R&D, with eventual release of new additional products.  The legacy products should be allowed to languish to almost nothing before discontinued. By doing this, maximum retention of customers is possible, aligned with maximum retention of profits.

My last comment is from a conversation I had a few years ago with an exec of a national manufacturing company. During this conversation, he told me they dropped any product when the annual sales went down to 1 million units a year. Is this crazy? Irritate, or worse, 1 million customers? What did it take to get the 1 million customers in the first place?

I guess my whole point all along has been not about Kodachrome; but has been about companies, their profit structure, and running off long time customers.  This seems so basic a subject: It's cheaper and more profitable to keep the customers you currently have, while trying to add more, than it is to run off your current customers and pay fortunes to acquire new ones. Sooner or later, you run out of customers.

This point is apparent with some of the current crop of extremely large businesses going away last year, and especially this year.

I thank anyone who reads all the way through my diatribes. I will check back, occasionally, for any future comments.

"Buy" all, Bob

I always preferred Kodak film, but if they do keep this up and completely abandon 35mm film, Fuji film it is.....for my Nikon.

Why do American companies keep forcing me to buy Japanese?

GONE BOB, I would have to agree with a lot you said. I to own a digital ,a 35 mm and a medium format. True the digital is super convenient as far as looking at your results. But it doesn't come close to the picture quality when it comes to color and crispness. So depending on what I'm shooting or planning to shoot which camera or film I grab. And you being from L.A. if you want to try something well worth the money there is a company making GUMBO called Just Gumbo.net it taste like home in a bowl. p.s. don't buy up all the kodachrome before I do. 

As a boy of 13, I spent many winter hours in a darkroom a friend and I constructed in  my mom's basement from scraps left over from a remodeling project. We shot roll after roll of b/w Pan-X on anything we could point a camera at (a 620 format Brownie box (subnote here: we found you could use 120 format in that camera if you could manage to wind the film onto the used 620 reel if it were done in complete dark ). We developed, produced contact sheets and enlargements on a small Durst 301 enlarger. We got motivated by the mystery of moving into the realm of color. We combined our allowances and bought a small, cheap, used 35mm and began to shoot. It was quite a thrill to perform all the steps required to produce a color negative and turn it into a color print. We decided try a color slide film and purchased a couple rolls of Kodachrome 64 and the chemicals to process it. We turned the neighbor's beagle dog into a veritable film star.

I guess what I'm trying to say here is my life was personally enriched while we learned a simple art. I will always miss those days and the discovery of the magic we found in a few roll of film. The darkroom, the little enlarger, all the photographs and the house where the magic happened are all gone now, but the WOW factor in a boy's life will always be a memory never fading like a not quite fixed photo print.

Why the surprise? Most people prefer new to better. Look at our political enviroment.