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Kodak Lagging in Digital World

Posted by michael on from the times-they-are-a-changin' dept.

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."

14 of 335 comments (clear)

  1. alas tis true by MrLint · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  2. Re:Film by silentbozo · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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...

  3. What a crock... by ffsnjb · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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
    1. Re:What a crock... by joe_bruin · · Score: 3, Interesting

      EK knew consumer film was dying before the world did, considering they invented the CCD.

      i believe the ccd was invented at bell laboratories, not eastman kodak.

  4. They do have other markets by ThisIsNotKendall · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  5. Re:Film by October_30th · · Score: 3, Interesting
    Properly stored compact flash cards last decades

    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
  6. Re:Film by Temporal · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  7. They tried.. by ZoneGray · · Score: 3, Interesting

    >> 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.

  8. Kodak? Who buys Kodak? by jedrek · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  9. Kodak's been failing for a long time by Pelerin · · Score: 4, Interesting
    The box claimed to take AA batteries, but they don't work properly. You need to purchase Kodak's proprietary batteries.

    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.

    1. Re:Kodak's been failing for a long time by macwhiz · · Score: 3, Interesting
      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.

      You might want to get your history straight on that one. The Advanced Photo System (APS) was jointly developed by Kodak and Fuji, along with camera makers like Canon, Minolta, and Nikon. Kodak's APS products sell under the Advantix brand name. That's hardly proprietary.

      I think APS was an attempt to stave off digital photography. The companies involved realized that 35mm point-and-shoot cameras are frustrating in many ways.

      APS attempted to address the limitations of 35mm for point-and-shoot users. No threading the film -- it's in a drop-in cartridge that self-loads. No negatives that need to be handled with care -- they come back in the film cartridge. You get index prints. You can have three sizes of print. On the better cameras, information about the conditions under which the camera took the photo are recorded on a magnetic data layer so the film processor doesn't have to guess what it should look like. Using 24mm film instead of 32mm allowed for less-bulky cameras, and technology developed for motion-picture film kept the pictures about the same quality as consumer-grade 32mm film.

      I think the biggest problem with APS was that the product rollout was botched. You could find the cameras, and the film... but you couldn't find one-hour developing. I was living in Kodak's home city, Rochester NY, when APS was introduced. It was months before there was a one-hour photo shop in Rochester that could process APS. Then there was one. Just one. It took a while for it to spread.

      Worse, the first "minilabs" for one-hour prints didn't include the magnetic data exchange feature. They were modifications of 32mm film processors -- APS film uses the same C-41 chemical process -- sometimes retrofit to existing machines. Without the data exchange, the photos from the more-expensive APS cameras really weren't any better than a cheaper 32mm point-and-shoot.

      Of course, people in the target market for APS couldn't care less about magnetic data exchange. They just wanted good pictures, and quick. Sure, you could get excellent pictures by sending them to Kodak processing, but in the market at the time, it was all about the one-hour photo.

      Even with mail-away processing, APS developing was at a premium. When the product was introduced, you paid a starter fee per roll, and then there was a per-print charge based on the size of the print. You could select from 4x6, 4x7, or 4x11.5 inch prints when you took the picture -- and the developer would charge a different price for each size print. You'd drop the film off and have no idea what it would cost until it came back. Eventually, developing moved to a flat-fee-per-roll system, but perhaps too late... and it was still at a premium compared to an equivalent roll of 35mm.

      APS is a good system. It's not for everyone, but for the majority of people, who just want to take the occasional photo of a vacation or family event with minimal fuss, it's very well designed. The cameras and film are great products. It's the lack of attention to the crucial last step -- developing -- that I believe killed APS.

  10. DCS Pro 14n Digital Camera: 14 Megapixels by Futurepower(R) · · Score: 4, Interesting


    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.

  11. Re:Film by dargaud · · Score: 3, Interesting
    A single hard drive can hold MASSIVE numbers of pictures. Your basement would be full of "plastic can[s]" if you had the equivalent number of pictures on film negatives

    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 ?
  12. Lenses by Nimloth · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.