Why don't Chinese companies copy the chemistry of expensive,

>>2740610
Because there's not enough market for it.

>>2740610
Maybe the down payment on the initial investment into a color/slide film line is too big?

What about design/building the line in the first place, who's going to sell you one? It's not like you can go to your local industrial wal-mart and pick one of the shelf these days. If you can't get something used (are there any left to buy?), will you hire a boatload of engineers to make & design expensive machinery for a dying niché market?

How will you reverse-engineer the exact film forumula? How much money would the whole process cost? Will you get an adequate result for an actually usable product, or just something "in the ballpark", and then have to heavily do your own research/development on top of that?

How easy is it for you to even just do the basic judging/research whether this all is feasable without existing extensive knowledge of the business?


I'm no chemist or industrial expert, but from my laymans perspective there appears to be a lot of hoops for someone uninitiated to just get even started, lot's uncertainty in terms of market, technical, and economical feasibility. From a business perspective, "why bother and not do something else instead with either higher chance or better return for your invested time/effort/money?"

>>2740615
Film has turned the corner mate, it's gonna come back in a big way

Lucky is did exactly that (super cheap agfa-ish bw film) and it folded

also you might think film is a big turnaround business but everyone but fuji is struggling to stay afloat

>>2740688
maybe in your hip social circle.

Nobody uses film

>>2740688
this reminds of back when i went on /x/ a lot instead of /p/ and i was utterly convinced that aliens were going to contact us and i told my mom that this (back then) was the day that they show themselves

>>2740612
this

it really wouldn't be worth it, even if they drastically lowered the price.

>>2740615

This is actually a reasonable thought process, especially in comparison to the OP.

The newest version of porta are only like 5 years old.

There's a reason why these films are made in their respective countries.

>>2740723
>being like this

But yeah, film is going nowhere. This in spite of a handful of popular film producers in Hollywood still preferring it. (Even with their support, subsidies are needed.)

Film manufacturing is a tremendously complex process that requires a bunch of specialized equipment and expertise, even if the patents are expired it's not like you can just read a couple of pages of diagrams and expect to start making it yourself. Chinese factories are good at ripping off electronics and stuff that are already made in china but they can't just miraculously copy some weird niche process done in another country.

One thing that could maybe happen is that if Kodak or Fuji or someone else totally folds and sells off all their stuff maybe someone in China could buy up the equipment. That would make it a lot easier but I'm not sure anybody would be interested and they would probably have the same problems that Kodak is having now which is that all those factories were made to produce metric fucktons of enormous reels of film at the peak of the film days and it's not economic to scale the production down to meet the tiny demand for film today.

>>2740803
>One thing that could maybe happen is that if Kodak or Fuji or someone else totally folds and sells off all their stuff maybe someone in China could buy up the equipment.
Isn't that what happened with Polaroid?
Some hipster took over their closed plant in Holland and reverse engineered the manufacturing process to crank out now instant film.

>>2740610
Shanghai and Lucky tried to do that but quality control was so awful that it wasn't worth, it wasn't all that cheap in small formats. Even tho Shanghai GP3 was actually quite nice emulsion, and cheap in 4x5.

Still, there is used machinery available in Europe and probably in the USA, too. But the transportation and installation of the machinery is quite sensitive, and there are somewhat few engineers with experience on it. Adox made a video on the matter when it bought a new coating machine, look up for it.

Also, New Portra and Ektar are very very recent, 5y or so, and even e6 films aren't 2 decades old.

It should be possible to engineer its way to kodachrome, a old engineer of Kodak (P.E.) commented on the matter on APUG, but e6 is nearly impossible. If you look for it, you will find that even autochrome (a very archaic process) cannot be replicated well, after it become extinct.

So Shanghai and Lucky are done now? I still have 5 rolls of GP3 I got for like 2-3 euros a roll. Shame, it was cheap and I think definitely good enough.

Yay! Let's bankrupt Kodak again!

Stop being cheap, guys.

>>2740610
>portra
>not shooting superior and cheaper Kodak ColorPlus or Kodacolor instead for $3/film

>>2740953
In hong Kong there's still new lucky films.

>>2740610
Because they ain´t FREAKING STUPID

>>2740688
no, it's a niche, a meme if you will.

>>2740803
I'm not too well versed in this but If fujifilm or Kodak folded would the price of film shoot up or lower drastically?

>>2741118
Shoot up because supply would be immediately finite. This happens on a smaller scale every time a certain film type is discontinued.

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>>2740610
te local cink-e-mart sells individual rolls of kodak in little plastic bags for 10 dollars eac