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Kodak Lagging in Digital World
mattmcal writes "Wired reports on the Kodak's struggle to survive and Mark Glaser comments on their demise at The Industry Standard saying that Kodak failed to take digital photography seriously, or at least failed to find a way to successfully transform their business. The Photo Marketing Association reported that in 2003, digital cameras outsold analog. Kodak's stock has been hovering near its 20-year low. Finally, today, the Asian Business Times reports that billionaire Carl Icahn sold all his shares saying the current business model there doesn't work."
I have an old family friend that works as a chemist as Kodak and as i recall its been hard times for a while. For ages of course Kodak's bred and butter has been film and associated chemicals. With the masses switching and of course the long standing competition there is just less and less pie to go round.
Of course on the flip side Kodak does have some good r&d, and with the future of OLEDs and such there may yet be a future.
Properly stored original film negatives last decades, whereas digital media is gone in a blink of an eye when your harddrive/memory card breaks down or you accidentally erase your media.
Ahhh, but like all analog media, when it comes time to copy the originals in order to preserve them, you lose information. Plus, you need a lot of room, and a controlled environment in order to really take care of film.
With digital, just keep multiple copies, and dup them, with no generation loss, as each new high-density storage media comes out.
I'm not saying digital is better - just that you're not using the benefits of digital to your advantage. Besides, it's kind of hard to erase write only media (ie, CD-Rs or WORMs, if you're really paranoid.)
Ironically, Kodak recently came out with a write-once storage unit for digital information (meant to safeguard data against tampering, by generating a read-only version) by using film...
How can someone claim that the company with the largest CCD on the market, the company that holds all the patents on the display tech that you will have on your desk in the next five years, has an ever increasing segment of the health imaging market and still sells more motion picture film (while quickly converting theatres to digital) than everyone else on the planet, combined, be lagging in the digital world.
I hear all this garbage talk from critics, but it just doesn't make any sense. The fact of the matter is, EK is doing just fine transitioning from consumer film to consumer digital sales. IIRC, they sold more consumer digital cameras than anyone else did last year. EK knew consumer film was dying before the world did, considering they invented the CCD.
Blah... Everyone says that EK is dying, but I'm working overtime this weekend... HAH!
"Why do you consent to live in ignorance and fear?" - Bad Religion
Kodak does have other non-consumer markets. I read today that my hometown hospital is converting all their old film based x-ray equipment over to Kodak digital stuff. Maybe not super profitable but they certainly aren't dead.
It does have a huge amount of pixels but it's still a crappy camera compared to the others. Check out those photographic tests... just terrible. Such horrible noise. I LOVE canon DSLR's (and canon camera's in general but then again my first camera was a Canon Powershot A20 and I've had 2 more cameras since then) and I hate kodak digital cameras so much, my aunt had one it was like $600 with some useless crap the guy at best buy tricked my uncle into buying. The picture quality was TERRIBLE, and the camera was dropped once from a VERY LOW height (one of her kids dropped it when taking a picture) and it never worked properly again (all the pictures come out horribly overexposed, and blurry too). My canon Powershot A20 was dropped onto a concrete train station ledge, bounced off, fell 6' and landed in some rocks. Did it still work? YES! And I'm not even exagerating the fall, I swear I thought that camera was toast (the lens was out too, I'm so lucky it didn't crack.) Sure the body had a few scratches (minor really) but the LCD screen was fine, the picture quality was unchanged and the camera still functioned properly.
Yes, assuming that you have a device that can read that card in ten years. The same goes for digital tapes, too. With the constant push for DRMd media players, I wouldn't be surprised if in a few years CD/DVD drives refuse to access old CD/DVD-R discs. Hell, already a few years ago I ran into a desktop Sony DVD player which refused to read CD-Rs unless they were of the Audio-variety (=more expensive due to a CD-R tax).
On the other hand, you can always access the film negatives because you've got the "access devices" embedded in your head.
Your post about snail-mail doesn't even make sense. Snail mail doesn't get accidentally lost at the press of a DEL-key.
The owls are not what they seem
Well, my laptop backs itself up automatically over Wifi whenever I'm at home. My home server in turn backs itself up onto an external hard drive as a scheduled task. All of this without any intervention from me. My work folders are backed up over the network when I'm at work. Any good backup system will not require user action, as you are right, users will not remember.
With film you don't have to keep on doing backups.
No, you just need to store the film carefully in a controlled environment.
10 Years ago, I worked in a small photo development business as a darkroom technican. Kodak film was 90% of the film we developed, but unlike most film, Kodak film was more expensive to develop because the propreitery technology used in it. Also that year our photo lab had bought a Macintosh running Mac OS 8 to help us manage our film database. Part of the special offer was a 28.8K modem connection and a Gremlin TZ digital camera. This camera could take 640x480 pictures and used a AMC (Now known as firewire) cable to connect to the camera. We were amazed for just the cost of a floppy disk ($0.50) we could take 40 high quality photos instantly!
I was so impressed that I set up a website about our photo service using pictures from my digital camera. I had over 1000 pictures on that site and it was being hosted by a Slackware Linux box with Apache 0.7 and Kernel 0.95 (Yes, the linux dark ages).
We got in contact with Gremlin Technolgies INC and we decided to sell Gremlin Digicams to our customers and for 1/10 of the price of ordianry development we offered our customers prints. The service was so popular that we made $600,000 profits in 1994.
We completly ditched kodak in 1995 and now we are a huge photobusiness that has 40 employees and makes over 1,000,000 in profits a year.
I am no longer an employee as I am now a freelance Debian on Mac technican, but it just goes to show that digital cameras can be a lucrative business if you ditch the analog monoliths!
Screenshot of My G5 desktop!
November of 2000 I was in a plane flying from Tahiti to Auckland and the people sitting next to me had been there for a sales conference dealing with film. I was taking picture of the islands and coral heads we were flying over. The woman introduced herself and said she had just been to a conference and asked me how many rolls of film I used on my holiday. I told her I didn't use and and and pull the memory card out of the camera and said I it took like 300 pictures and I had six more. She wasn't happy with that answer.
Kodak recently announced that next year it was abandoning traditional film cameras in (at least) north america in favour of digital & disposable film cameras. How can this not be taking the market seriously?
I wouldn't be surprised if in a few years CD/DVD drives refuse to access old CD/DVD-R discs.
Oh, what rubbish. No drive manufacturer would put such a limitation on their drives because no one would buy them. No congress would enact a law requiring such a thing because of the obvious damage it would do to the computing industry. Besides that, moving digital data to new mediums is easy and has virtually zero risk of quality loss.
Your post about snail-mail doesn't even make sense. Snail mail doesn't get accidentally lost at the press of a DEL-key.
No, it accidentally gets lost because a gust of wind blew it out the window, or you mistook it for trash and threw it out, or you spilled coffee all over it, or you filed it in the wrong place in your gigantic file cabinet that you use to store e-mails. You can't very well hit ctrl+f and run a search of your file cabinet, or tell it to sort itself by sender, date, or subject.
Also, you should get a better e-mail client. If one press of the "delete" key deletes e-mails without any sort of confirmation, then your software has some serious design issues.
Not only does digital data never degrade, but you can easily make all the backups you want. If you are really so worried about losing any of it, get a RAID-5, make tape backups, whatever. But with analog, not only is it a lot of work to make copies of 100,000 pictures, but the image quality of the copies will be less than that of the original. Hell, most analog mediums degrade even when they're just sitting in storage.
Bottom line is, keeping digital data safe is much easier than keeping analog data safe, especially when you have a lot of it.
Back in '96 I joined Kodak out of school along with my girlfriend. I'm a computer engineer, she is a chemical engineer. I was offered a much better salary than me (5% more).
That tells you how they percieve that investing in their conventional imaging was more important that the new digital imaging.
I left after three years. There was a constant struggle between the conventional imaging product development teams and the digital imaging ones. The conventional imaging guys were protecting their turf instead of working together with the digital imaging guys to bring innovation. Really sad.
Besides, who wants to work in Rochester, NY?
Maybe Kodak can still thrive, if they successfully re-invent themselves as a provider of OLED technology. They've already got a number of licencees.
>> Kodak failed to take digital photography seriously, or at least failed to find a way to successfully transform
I have to figure they took it seriously; I just realized my first three digital cameras were all Kodaks, it was 1999 before Nikon had anything to match 'em. And my dad is still using my 1998 Kodak D260.
But... Kodak was never a camera company, and one of the amazing phenomena is that the digicam market is dominated by film camera makers, not by technology companies or by film companies. Sony and HP have established a foothold, but only through enormous effort. Fuji has made some progress, but it's hardly comparable to their share of film sales. Other than that, it's Nikon, Canon, Olympus, Minolta.
What killed Kodak was that they had never sold high-quality film cameras, I guess. They led the way in Digital SLR's with their early Canon-partnered products, but when Canon pulled out, it left them pretty high and dry.
Anyway, anybody who thinks that Kodak was a lumbering giant who "just didn't get it," is just reciting lame cliches. They really were one of the early leaders in digital.
yup, i have a friend with a 29 picture digital camera that used to be disposable but is now... just a digital camera. no view screen, but if you're comparing it to film that's not a problem anyway. somehow this makes me think of DRM schemes. I don't know why, but I can't shake the feeling that we're going to see subscription-based digital cameras, and 99 cent pictures. ...yes yes I know it won't happen, but I can dream about terrible business ideas, can't I?
If you get nervous, just remember that there are a few billion other people who don't really give a damn.
Analog photography is a trinity: Camera - Film - Paper. Digital photography drops that down to two elements, the camera and the film. Kodak's main business was the film, and that's just gone. They never had a strong camera division, actually, their cameras were pretty shit. I had contact with a couple of their P&S models and went running back to my Olympus Mju. The photographers I know who are still rocking film (which is all of them, because even if they're using digital as a 35mm replacement they're still using film for medium format) have all gone to Fuji. The only thing I see people buying from Kodak is paper.
It might be a matter of perception. Canon, Nikon and Olympus got it. They realized that digital photography is all about the camera. They were the camera companies, they capitalized on that. Kodak was just making... the stuff nobody cared about. What part of digital photography finally makes its way to prints anyway? I've never had a photo printed, just share all of them among friends via the net. Hell, even when I'm taking photos on film, I develop and scan. And of course, I'm shooting on Fuji.
That's a revealing quote, and is the big reason behind Kodak's troubles for a long time, way before the advent of digital photography.
A couple of decades ago, Kodak was king of the market with its InstaMatic camera. It was widely popular, but the film cartridges it used were propietary. This meant Kodak had a lock on the market, and they made billions.
Then, 35mm SLRs became available to the masses. 35mm film had a slightly larger negative size than Kodak's film, which gave it higher quality. More importanty, 35mm was not a propietary technology so the film worked with cameras from any number of manufacturers, and the film itself could be made by anyone.
Kodak could not, or would not, adapt to this situation; and they've been looking for the next InstaMatic ever since. Next thing they tried was 110 film: smaller negative size, and still propietary. Serious amateurs, and pros, didn't go for it.
Then came several other films (like clockwork, every couple of years during the 80s there'd be some new "system" from Kodak with a new film format). The last one was, I believe, Advantix. The theme was always the same: Kodak wanted again to lock-in consumers with propietary films, and 35mm users weren't buying.
So all Kodak cameras since the InstaMatic have flopped. And thanks to open competition, they got their clocks cleaned on 35mm film by the likes of Fuji, etc.
So this is a company who still thinks it can capture significant segments of the imaging market by introducing propietary technologies. In the digital market it's obvious to the Slashdot crowd that won't work; but the point is, in conventional photo it also had not been working for a l-o-n-g time and Kodak cannot, or will not, see that. They are still looking for the next InstaMatic and that's going to kill them eventually. The company is still so huge that it will take some time for it to die off, but unless they change their whole philosophy, they'll be gone.
Visit the Kodak web site to see 14 megapixel digital images. The detail is amazing. You can see tiny white hairs on the faces of the models.
Presumably, in 5 years or so, cameras with this resolution will be inexpensive.
Then the quality of your digital images must be really poor. I have several 250Gb HD inside my PC, and some external onto USB2IDE converters as backup just to store my images. A compressed lossless PNG/TIFF of a good 4000dpi image runs 20 to 40Mb each, so that's no more than a 10 000 images. The same quantity of unmounted slides fits a few shoeboxes in my basement once they are scanned.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
I work for Kodak, so just to be safe I'll post as an AC:)
The #1 thing to remember is that Kodak is a film company. That's the history, that's the culture, that's the only way they know how to operate.
They suffer from the same problem as other large companies, in that it has so much inertia that it's nearly impossible to change direction quickly enough before crashing into the rocks.
Kodak is based in a relatively small city (Rochester, NY), that has very few other options for employment. Unfortunately, the very people responsible for changes have been with the company for so long that they don't know any other way of doing things, and they know they don't really have anywhere else to go if they lose their job. It makes people scared to get noticed, so people tend to make small, safe changes that don't rock the boat too much.
I've sat in on meetings where upper management tells us that we need to take risks, try new ideas, look at things from a different angle. But, off-line, if you actually suggest something different from the status quo, "it's not the way we do things".
So, you end up seeing changes in the company that don't really change things. Stop selling film cameras in the US, but continue elsewhere. Move manufacturing to cheaper locations, but keep making film. Acknowledge that digital cameras exist, but try to "develop" the pictures in drug-store kiosks. And Kodak _has_ pretty good engineering, but unless the idea helps the film business, it's quietly ignored.
It's one of the reasons that I'm ashtonished by IBM; they transformed from a product company to a services company. They're happy to sell you a server, but would prefer to manage someone else's. They'll sell you network equipment, but would rather manage your network. They'll almost give you Lotus Notes, so long as they can manage the databases and mail accounts.
So, while I'm hoping that Kodak will pull through, I don't see them making the kinds of changes necessary to do so.
I've seen lenses superior to Kodak's in Cracker Jack boxes.
As a digital camera salesman, I imagine I contribute to their bad imagine, but then again, I would feel remorse recommending any of their digital products to my customers...
I tried giving them a chance last year by attending their special Digital Media Training last year in Montreal, and after 3 hours of talk all I'd learned was that digital Kodak technology still didn't come anywhere near film quality (both for video and photography).
WTG Kodak.