Kodak won’t sell traditional film still cameras in the US and Canada anymore, and instead will concentrate on digital imaging technologies for medicine and industry. Of course, at Kodak the cameras were always loss-leaders for the film and the processing supplies. They used to bring out a new cheap consumer photo format every year or two (remember the Disc?), mainly to force processing labs to buy new machinery. With 35mm now the standard for both pro and amateur analog photography, this old planned-obsolescence cycle ended.

The purists and nostalgists are already ruing the rise of digital photography and the decline of film. As you know, I’m no purist. Digital allows a shooter of candid photojournalism to take hundreds more shots a day.

And the planet gets a lot fewer gallons of icky chemicals dumped onto it. (Two of the worst chemical-cleanup sites in America are Kodak’s main complex in Rochester, NY and the former View-Master factory in Portland.)