[rollei_list] Re: OT: Slide Film and E6
----- Original Message ----- From: "Peter K." <peterk727@xxxxxxxxx> 
To: <rollei_list@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Saturday, December 22, 2007 3:46 PM
Subject: [rollei_list] Re: OT: Slide Film and E6
Thanks Richard. My error. I did notice Portra BW was disco'd. Glad to see there are still some films that remain. 2007 has surely been the year of 
digital. I hope film sticks around a while longer.
So do I. There is evidently still a pretty large market for "conventional" photographic products, just not the enormous market there was until digital began to erode it. The problem is that the larger companies, like Kodak, Agfa, Fuji, and Ilford, have technology which the small, mostly formerly eastern european, companies do not have and are not likely ever to develop. This makes more difference to film than paper but results in both products being behind the times and in rather poor quality control. Fuji makes good B&W printing paper but sells it only in Japan. I don't know why they are not interested in a larger market but there may be good business reasons that are not obvious. There have been other transistions in technology historically that are somewhat comparable, for instance the supplanting of vacuum tubes by transistors and the supplanting of steam locomotives by diesel-electric. In the U.S. some vacuum tube manufacturers managed to make the transision but others died out and none of the three makers of main-line steam locomotives survived. Agfa was already in other businesses so it simply dropped out of making chemical photographic products. Kodak, I think, would have like to do so but its main product line was chemical photography. Ilford has managed to hold on perhaps because they are a much smaller company and more flexible. Fuji is also in many other businesses and it appears they have managed to continue to find photographic products sufficiently profitable to keep on with them. Digital is not going to go away but, one hopes, neither will chemical photography. 

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Richard Knoppow
Los Angeles, CA, USA
dickburk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx 
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