Kodak: The fading of the Old Yeller

Painful

Ouch! Never have I seen so many mangled metaphors squeezed together in one article.

Dire journalism.

Old yeller

A lot of adverse comment on EK re their slow to move philosophycould well be appropriate but how could they actually replace the massive revenue from high profit film which the market place no longer needed? What with? Surely not with non repeatable low value sales of digital camera memory chips etc.

Support Western brands

All the desirable digital compacts of today look like the instamatics from forty years ago. Don't tell me Kodak is going to miss that boat as well.

Can't agree

The only people who look into the future are market manipulators.

One could see how Kodak's digital camera line was comprised of cheap gimmicks, with lower quality sensors compared to comparable consumer models put out by Canon, Nikon, Sony, etc.

Every time I looked at a Kodak, it didn't even have RAW mode - something prosumers and better need, since JPG only strips out quality. Maybe some Kodak camera models had RAW format, but most did not.

But they did come with lots of gimmicks... most people, by now, know that more gimmicks means there's less of something else (usually quality - costs too much).

Nobody can see the future, but if you make a piece of junk, don't be surprised if sales go down.

Never mind other mitigating factors, such as job losses, stagnating wages, etc... given that even professional photographers are feeling the pinch, they aren't going to upgrade as quickly as well.

Bring Back Kodachrome

I Never had the chance to use Kodachrome, Kodak, Being IT back!

Demand for Instant in store printing?

It strikes me that the comments about super market photo printing are slightly mis-guided. Having recently left my job as a Boots laboratory technician (the largest high street provider of commercial printing in the UK) I can tell you that digital printing is most certainly NOT on the increase. I worked at the lab for 3 years in which time the film processing services never even approached breaking even. The digital services simply acted as a means to support the photographic area or the store. Despite the enormous profit margins when printing digital photographs the entire photographic department was being run at a heavy loss to the company. The proof of this can be seen in the fact that 6 months ago Boots Ltd closed 320 of it's processing laboratories. The lab have been replaced with a newly developed HP based instant printing service which produces extremely poor results.

In summation I would suggest that Kodaks future could scarcely exist in a commercial printing context.