Everyone saw it coming, but the leap to digital has happened faster than expected, analyst says.Eastman Kodak Co.'s announcement that it would be cutting up to 10,000 more jobs is less an indication of the company's health than it is a nod to the rapid shrinking of the film market, some analysts believe.
The digital photography boom has been killing film sales at a pace much quicker than many companies, including Kodak, could have anticipated. And the market will continue to founder, with the effect on film vendors and processors being close to "catastrophic," said Charles LeCompte, president of Lyra Research.
"Kodak is the most public company to suffer from how quickly film is declining, but there are plenty of others hurting," he said, adding that a number of European companies focusing on film have gone bankrupt within the past few years.
These enterprises did see the size of the digital photography wave, LeCompte added, but not its speed. Kodak has been investing heavily in digital photography for nearly 10 years while demanding that executives to concentrate on the issue, but the company didn't move quickly enough to avoid layoffs, said Mike Wolf, director of digital photography trends at research firm InfoTrends.
Click here to read about Kodak's efforts to ride the digital curve.
"Anyone who has been reliant on film in the past has had to adjust their model or meet their maker," said Wolf. "What's happening at Kodak is happening across the industry."
Although Kodak did not anticipate the speed of film's demise, some in the digital photography industry feel that they did notice the rapid change, and adjusted their strategies accordingly.
"Some people didn't see the shift to digital cameras happening so fast, but we did see, early on, that film was on its way out," said Dan Havlik, public relations specialist at Canon USA.
Film will always have a place in the photography world, Havlik said, but it will likely get pushed to the hobbyist and specialist market as digital photography matures.
With the move away from film, companies like Canon and Kodak will continue to find ways to increase the sophistication of their products, Havlik noted. "We're dealing with some issues of convergence now, looking at how to start adding more video capability to still cameras, for example," he said.
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The digital boom may even extend beyond the photography world, LeCompte said. As digital imaging grows up, paper printouts could begin to suffer the same fate as processed photographs.
"In 15 years, printing may be as antiquated as film," he said. "The ramifications of film's demise will be more far-reaching than many people expect."
