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CommentsROCHESTER, N.Y. – Sorry, Paul Simon, Kodak is taking your Kodachrome away.
The Eastman Kodak Co. announced Monday that it’s retiring its oldest film stock because of declining customer demand in an increasingly digital age.
The world’s first commercially successful color film, immortalized in song by Simon, spent 74 years in Kodak’s portfolio. It enjoyed its heyday in the 1950s and ’60s but in recent years has nudged closer to obscurity: Sales of Kodachrome are now just a fraction of 1 percent of the company’s total sales of still-picture films, and only one commercial lab in the world still processes it.
Those numbers and the unique materials needed to make it persuaded Kodak to call its most recent manufacturing run the last, said Mary Jane Hellyar, the outgoing president of Kodak’s Film, Photofinishing and Entertainment Group.
The company now gets about 70 percent of its revenue from its digital business, but plans to stay in the film business “as far into the future as possible,” Hellyar said.
She points to the seven new professional still films and several new motion picture films introduced in the last few years and to a strategy that emphasizes efficiency. Kodachrome was made only about once a year.
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