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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...
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.
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.