Smile And Say 'Lawsuit'

If a picture is worth a thousand words, how much is that in cash?

For Mark McCarthy, who sued a supermarket and Kodak when they lost his vacation photos, it was worth $8,000 — the sum the two companies agreed to pay him in an out-of-court settlement, according to news reports Monday.

McCarthy, a business consultant, refused to accept it when a Tesco supermarket and Kodak declined to compensate him for losing slides from a January 2002 trip that included pictures of Las Vegas and the Grand Canyon.

At first, Kodak and Tesco said they were only prepared to offer him new film, the 41-year-old McCarthy, from Potters Bar, north of London, told the Daily Mail tabloid.

"I eventually established that the slides had arrived at Kodak's processing laboratory…and they confirmed that they had developed them to be returned to Tesco, but after that the trail went cold," he said.

Under the agreement, neither company was prepared to comment on the case. A Tesco spokeswoman said the company will continue looking for the slides for a year.