When the end came for Kodachrome, even mainstream news outlets published reminiscences about the legendary film. But Paul Simon never wrote a song about Plus-X, a venerable black & white emulsion which Kodak has just discontinued. So, its finale has met with a quieter response—only a few sighs and grumbles appearing in nerdy photography forums.
Perhaps that’s understandable, since Plus-X was merely one of numerous B&W films which Kodak has made over the years. And even Kodak’s own advertising rarely highlighted the film. Compared to Tri-X, the 125-speed Plus-X offered finer grain; but T-Max 100 (which remains available) uses tabular crystals with a grain structure even smoother still. So some may scarcely notice when Plus-X disappears.
1950s Plus-X packaging. Image courtesy Tony Delgrosso
Yet Plus-X is even older than Tri-X. In fact its production run was almost as long as Kodachrome’s—just one year briefer, if my math is right. Plus-X first reached the market in 1938, originally (like Kodachrome) as a stock for movie cameras, not snapshots. By 1939, Plus-X was offered for still cameras in 35mm and 828 sizes; and the Weston Electrical Instrument Corp. rated it as “50″ on their own film-speed scale (the ASA standard did not even exist then). It was a finer-grained, panchromatic film aimed at enthusiast users of “minature” cameras.
But when Kodak axed the cine version of Plus-X in April 2010, speculation began that the still-camera version was next. Now that’s happened.
Kodak has been pummeled by bad press throughout the fall of 2011. They’ve only made money in one year out of the last seven. And as Kodak discontinues more emulsions, photographers are becoming jittery—even wondering whether Kodak might drop film entirely. New markets like inkjet and commercial printing seem to be where the company sees its salvation.
A while back I got a copy of Robert Shanebrook’s nice 2010 book, Making Kodak Film. While this text probably goes into more technical detail than the average photographer would ever need to know, I found it fascinating. Among the tidbits found there is the actual size of a Kodak production run, once they’ve set the machines to coat a particular emulsion type. The clear film base is manufactured in rolls 54″ wide; and a roll can be up to two miles long. (No doubt this varies a bit based on its thickness.) After applying all the emulsion layers, drying them, and winding up the completed film, this is known as a “master roll” and it goes on to the slitting and packaging stages.
That’s a huge amount of film—more than an acre. In 35mm terms, it’s roughly 100,000 rolls. If it takes Kodak more than a year to sell that much of a particular emulsion, the likelihood they’ll coat another master roll becomes extremely doubtful.
Kodak built their immense, sophisticated, Building 38 production line in 1990. It helped them keep costs low at a time when the world was still buying film by the mile for their family & holiday snaps. But today, that massive plant has become something of an albatross. It means a particular film type is toast, once sales drop below a certain threshold. (Remember that Kodak is a publicly-held company, answerable to its stockholders.)
But there’s another ominous trend for Kodak, one I think most photographers aren’t aware of.
Kodak actually sells much more film for motion pictures than for stills. This includes the highly-respected Vision camera stocks, as well as the film that goes into thousands of movie distribution prints. (As I understand it, each movie release print costs about a thousand bucks to make, using 8,000 or 10,000 feet of film.)
Unfortunately, all that is changing fast. I found this article from CreativeCOW quite chilling: it claims that in 2008, movie emulsions were 92% of Kodak’s film business. Yet today, on both the production and theatrical-release ends, movie-film use is tumbling. Conversion of theaters to digital display has finally gained traction (the cost savings are obvious). And the price of pro-quality digital cinema cameras continues to drop, with attention-grabbing announcements just this month from Red and Canon.
Kodak ad, April 1939 Popular Photography. Scan courtesy Nesster
Kodak’s film-coating plant is the size of a couple of football fields (see it on Google Maps). Can you imagine its heating bill, or the electricity to run its pumps and motors? The wages to keep all that equipment maintained? Or the capital costs to build it? (At least “keeping the lights on” is not a concern here!) This is on top of the historically-high price of silver we are currently experiencing. All those costs must be recovered from the sales-price of film.
So as sales volumes drop, the cost per roll inevitably rises. The shrinking market for movie emulsions affects all of us.
There’s no question that Kodak is in the weakest shape of the the major film manufacturers. The other giant in the film world is Fuji: And while film is a shrinking part of Fuji’s business, overall that company is better diversified and still profitable. It’s tragic and baffling that Kodak, the best-known name in photography, failed for so long to leverage that advantage into new and growing markets.
And for us B&W shooters, what about Ilford?
There’s a nice interview at filmwasters.com with Steven Brierley of Harman Technology (Ilford Photo), where he speaks candidly about the state of the company. (His interview follows 15 minutes of introduction.) If you care about the future of black & white film, it’s well worth 45 minutes of your time. Obviously he needs to spin the positive side of the story; but I ended up pretty reassured that Ilford will be around for a while. The scale of Ilford’s coating plant is much smaller and more nimble than Kodak’s (since they never made mass-market color films). The company is owned just by 6 of its managers, who don’t need to pump up shareholder values by taking short-term decisions. Ilford is currently profitable, and monochrome photo materials are their core business.
Most encouraging is that they’ve seen sales of 120 film increase this year! I worry what fraction of that is driven by Lomography scenesters with ironic sideburns (will they still care about film in 2015?). Yet for now, they’re keeping film manufacture subsidized for the rest of us. But as a smaller-volume producer, Ilford needed to raise prices this year, and it’s hard to see that trend changing.
So the news for film is mixed. We might see Kodak exit the film business, although that would be a painful and historic loss. But film per se seems ready to endure for the medium term at least.
As always, the lesson is: Buy the film you use, and use the film you buy!
November 16th, 2011 at 2:03 pm
I neglected to mention that Ilford’s film FP4+ is probably the best direct replacement for Plus-X, as both use “traditional” silver halide grains with similar tonality.
November 29th, 2011 at 3:29 pm
The website iSuppli has the latest figures on how quickly movie-projection is going digital; As of January 2012 they anticipate more than half of theater screens will have abandoned 35mm film.
March 12th, 2012 at 10:37 am
As of March, 2012, Kodak has also discontinued its last remaining E-6 (slide) films, Ektachrome and Elite Chrome.
March 20th, 2013 at 12:34 am
Trivia Note: I was amused to notice a brief cameo in 1953′s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes from a box of 35mm Plus-X. It appears at around 52:55 in the blu-ray edition.
September 11th, 2013 at 8:39 pm
[...] the earlier Jim Jarmusch films, largely in part to being shot on Kodak’s now defunct luminous Plus-X 5231 B/W film stock. In fact, Johnny X was the last film shot on the legendary film stock used for [...]
August 2nd, 2014 at 11:49 am
[...] photography blogger Vox summed up the daunting calculus very well in 2011: Among the tidbits found [in the book Making Kodak Film] is the actual size of a [...]