I'm not entirely sure how it got there, but recently a roll of Kodak 400 MAX colour film found itself on my desk.
This is especially odd because I haven't shot a roll of film since August 2003. What could it contain? Not having been refrigerated, surely the image has degraded. Why didn't I develop it in the first place?
Whatever it was, it must not have been important enough to care. It was a much different world back then, in 2003. I had just hired on with the Battlefords News-Optimist, and quickly realized that film had gone the way of the dodo bird. Within a month I took out a line of credit to buy myself a very pricey digital camera. The payoff was saving myself an hour of work each day, monkeying around with film.
At the time there were two digital single lens reflex (DSLR) cameras I was seriously looking at - the Nikon D100, and the Fujifilm S2 Pro. Each was capable of producing a six-megapixel image, and each cost around $3,000. At the time, Kodak also made a DSLR, known as the Kodak DSC Pro 14n. While it had more pixels and a larger sensor, it wasn't in the running because it was simply too expensive for me at the time, coming in around $5,000. The reviews also found that it was a pretty poor camera compared to the Nikon or Fuji equivalents.
At the inflection point of my photographic career, Kodak was not a consideration. I bought the Fuji, which was really a Fuji sensor grafted onto a Nikon body. It took better photos than the Nikon.
Not surprisingly, the DCS 14n was one of the last professional level DSLRs Kodak would produce. Shortly thereafter, it was out of the DSLR game, never to return.
This is remarkable because not only had Kodak invented the first digital cameras in the '70s, it had a huge jump on the competition in the 1990s when it all but created the DSLR market. You can find a great retrospective by Calgary photographer Rob Galbraith here (http://bit.ly/abX8F).
The DSLR market was Kodak's to lose, and lose it, they did. From 1994 to 2003, Kodak went from revolutionary innovator to also-ran.
Professional level cameras are important because they are usually the bleeding edge technology, allowing lower level cameras to eventually pick up that tech. More importantly, they allow consumers to aspire to something better than they either need or can afford. Thousands buy Nikon's D3100 and D5100 consumer models for every one flagship D4 sold. But a very large number of those D5100 owners love the idea of some day owning a D4, in the same way many car owners want a Mercedes.
If you don't have the high end, soon your low end suffers. Then you have no end, as Kodak has shown.
In Kodak's heyday, they were getting about 70-per-cent margins on film, and had about 90 per cent of the North American market. Consider this: since I went digital, I have shot about 100,000 frames with my Fuji S2 Pro, and another 106,000 frames with my Nikon D200 before both were put out to pasture.
Add to that another 137,000 frames with my current Nikon D700, and the total is 343,000 shots since 2003. I never would have shot anything close to that on film, but if I had, at an average cost of 50 cents per frame for developing and 4x6 printing, I would have put $120,000 into Kodak's bottom line. That assumes consistently using Kodak film and Kodak labs, which isn't terribly far-fetched.
Instead, I have 10 terabytes of storage across eight external hard drives and three internal hard drives. Between all of these, I doubt Kodak made a dime unless it was for a royalty on some obscure patent. And in the meantime, my D4 on order is rated to take 400,000 frames before the shutter gives out, and I hope to add another 10 terabytes of storage this spring.
While Kodak's bankruptcy this month is sad, it was a long time in coming. The decisions they made 10 years ago have come home to roost.
My roll of film on my desk sure looks lonely now - and obsolete.
Brian Zinchuk is editor of Pipeline News. He can be reached at [email protected]
