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Company attempts to transition customers to a proprietary product but fails. There is a lot of upside for Kodak with this product, but not so much for the cons

Company attempts to transition customers to a proprietary product but fails. There is a lot of upside for Kodak with this product, but not so much for the consumer, especially at the price point for the camera. Instamatic already existed and covered the same use cases. The only "problem" is that Instamatic was going off patent so anybody would be able to make the film.

ghaff 4y ago
I'm not sure what the sales numbers were for the 110 film Instamatics but it was also the case that anything that used film that was much less than a 35mm frame in area was fairly compromised in terms of quality--especially when combined with other camera components that were low cost.
- JKCalhoun 4y ago
  Yeah, that was my take. Put a bunch of tiny 110 frames around in a wheel pattern and add a plastic lens (I'm guessing here) and what do you think you're going to get? Even 35mm was marginal in quality (he says from his spoiled-by-modern-digital-photography future). I went back to film and tried a nice Nikon F3 with a great lens. Photos were okay. Absolutely wowed though when I started experimenting with 120 (medium format) film cameras.
  - paulmd 4y ago
    > Even 35mm was marginal in quality 35mm is great up to an 8x10 print. It'll do 11x14 if you don't stand too close. It's 30mp+ of optical resolution. The thing to remember is that at the time, nobody was scanning, they were doing optical enlargements directly onto printer paper, with 6-element macro-optimized process lenses. That's a much higher-quality optical path than you get out of almost any scanner - drum scans and high-end CCD scans (flextight or similar) can get there but even midrange CCD film scanners struggle with 35mm and your average flatbed photo scanner doesn't stand a chance. Nowadays digital has entirely displaced this flow - even at a photo lab you will most likely get prints made from scans. And they're much lower quality than contemporary prints would have been. If they're B+W, try wet-printing those 35mm negatives sometime. Find a local college darkroom and get someone to walk you through split-printing on variable-contrast paper on one or two of your photos. You'll see. https://www.guidetofilmphotography.com/split-filter-printing.html https://www.guidetofilmphotography.com/split-filter-printing... https://www.35mmc.com/27/04/2020/split-grade-printing-darkroom-technique-part-4-by-sroyon-mukherjee/ https://www.35mmc.com/27/04/2020/split-grade-printing-darkro... But yeah medium format is incredibly easy to produce usable scans, by comparison. With top-end gear you can get just as much resolution off a MF negative as 35mm - you can do optical enlargement to several feet or even a yard+ on the long edge. But it's way way easier to get something usable for a 8x10 print or something off a MF negative than it is 35mm.
    - JKCalhoun 4y ago
      > even at a photo lab you will most likely get prints made from scans That's crazy. I think I will try a darkroom again. It has been 45 years...
    - dagw 4y ago
      35mm is great up to an 8x10 print. It'll do 11x14 if you don't stand too close. It's 30mp+ of optical resolution. In the ideal case. Shooting 35mm is much more sensitive to higher ISO, missed exposure, incorrect development etc. Sure perfectly exposed Velvia 50 or Kodachrome 64 developed at a professional lab which really cared about the quality and temperature of their chemicals, has really high resolution. An ISO 400 or 800 film where you missed you exposure slightly and that got developed at a crappy 1 hour photo place, will have pretty mediocre image quality.
    - ghaff 4y ago
      A lot depends on ISO too of course, which is a probably underappreciated aspect of digital. With 35mm film, you top out at about ISO 400 in B&W with standard chemistry although you can push things to about 1600 (though it shows). With color slides, the latter ISO 100 E6 films were pretty good. Grain and contrast started getting a lot worse much higher than that. Of course, Velvia 50 and Kodachrome 25 (which had about the same effective speed) were better.
    - shard 4y ago
      > 35mm is great up to an 8x10 print. It'll do 11x14 if you don't stand too close. It's 30mp+ of optical resolution. Sure, if you are taking photos of technical drawings or scientific specimens. For artistic purposes, the composition and subject matter much more than resolution. We were regularly blowing up 35mm to 16x20 in photo class, and I've been to photo exhibitions where images such as Steve McCurry's Afghan girl was blown up to five-foot-tall prints.
      - ghaff 4y ago
        And I'm guessing (without researching) that the Afghan girl shot was done using KC25 with a tripod.
- whartung 4y ago
  Sure, but I know as a consumer, I didn't care. I loved 110 because of the form factor. Tiny, pocketable cameras with tiny, pocketable film. The 4x6s that came from the drug store looked like pictures to me, I never enlarged anything beyond that. I had one of the smallest cameras around and took hundreds of pictures with it. Clearly, not a photography connoisseur, but it met my needs. Especially the later fancy models with the built in strobe flash. (Flash bars and flash cubes kind of didn't work with the form factor.)
  - shard 4y ago
    This reminds me of the tiny mechanical camera that I had as a kid for the 110 film format. It was my first camera and I loved that little thing. It looked something like this: https://www.flickr.com/photos/juan-antonio-capo/6981339701/in/photostream https://www.flickr.com/photos/juan-antonio-capo/6981339701/i...
Theodores 4y ago
The problem in the UK was what I call 'bang per buck'. Most magazines had envelopes fall out of them for mail order photo processing. This market was a race to the bottom, with the service becoming a commodity. To keep you coming back there would be a 'free' unexposed reel of film for every reel you sent in. When the new disc films came along there were no upsides in area of film exposed, there was no upgrade path (you could not use the same film in an SLR as a point and shoot fixed focus) and only photographers that worked commercially were in the market for buying film. Most people went for the mail order option or Boots The Chemist, found on every High Street and able to do a quick turnaround at a fair price. The 1980's were also quite expensive when it came to consumer items. We no longer buy cameras 'made in America' and the thought of it is quite unimaginable today, you know straight off the bat that you are not going to be able to afford it. Furthermore, nothing in store was on a 'point of sale' system with retailers knowing exactly how much stock they have. There have been vast efficiency changes over the last forty years. All of this factors into price. On the flip side, the boomers were relatively rich and the difference between rich and poor was not what it is today, hence there was a large customer base in the middle class that could afford these things.
acomjean 4y ago
After they discontinued it, Kodak tried another small film format (aps). More traditional cartridge style and let you shoot different aspect ratios. But smaller file meant worse quality than 35mm. The name “APS” lived on when camera manufacturers used smaller sensors on cameras designed for full frame lenses. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Photo_System https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Photo_System

ghaff 4y ago

I'm not sure what the sales numbers were for the 110 film Instamatics but it was also the case that anything that used film that was much less than a 35mm frame in area was fairly compromised in terms of quality--especially when combined with other camera components that were low cost.

JKCalhoun 4y ago
Yeah, that was my take. Put a bunch of tiny 110 frames around in a wheel pattern and add a plastic lens (I'm guessing here) and what do you think you're going to get? Even 35mm was marginal in quality (he says from his spoiled-by-modern-digital-photography future). I went back to film and tried a nice Nikon F3 with a great lens. Photos were okay. Absolutely wowed though when I started experimenting with 120 (medium format) film cameras.
- paulmd 4y ago
  > Even 35mm was marginal in quality 35mm is great up to an 8x10 print. It'll do 11x14 if you don't stand too close. It's 30mp+ of optical resolution. The thing to remember is that at the time, nobody was scanning, they were doing optical enlargements directly onto printer paper, with 6-element macro-optimized process lenses. That's a much higher-quality optical path than you get out of almost any scanner - drum scans and high-end CCD scans (flextight or similar) can get there but even midrange CCD film scanners struggle with 35mm and your average flatbed photo scanner doesn't stand a chance. Nowadays digital has entirely displaced this flow - even at a photo lab you will most likely get prints made from scans. And they're much lower quality than contemporary prints would have been. If they're B+W, try wet-printing those 35mm negatives sometime. Find a local college darkroom and get someone to walk you through split-printing on variable-contrast paper on one or two of your photos. You'll see. https://www.guidetofilmphotography.com/split-filter-printing.html https://www.guidetofilmphotography.com/split-filter-printing... https://www.35mmc.com/27/04/2020/split-grade-printing-darkroom-technique-part-4-by-sroyon-mukherjee/ https://www.35mmc.com/27/04/2020/split-grade-printing-darkro... But yeah medium format is incredibly easy to produce usable scans, by comparison. With top-end gear you can get just as much resolution off a MF negative as 35mm - you can do optical enlargement to several feet or even a yard+ on the long edge. But it's way way easier to get something usable for a 8x10 print or something off a MF negative than it is 35mm.
  - JKCalhoun 4y ago
    > even at a photo lab you will most likely get prints made from scans That's crazy. I think I will try a darkroom again. It has been 45 years...
  - dagw 4y ago
    35mm is great up to an 8x10 print. It'll do 11x14 if you don't stand too close. It's 30mp+ of optical resolution. In the ideal case. Shooting 35mm is much more sensitive to higher ISO, missed exposure, incorrect development etc. Sure perfectly exposed Velvia 50 or Kodachrome 64 developed at a professional lab which really cared about the quality and temperature of their chemicals, has really high resolution. An ISO 400 or 800 film where you missed you exposure slightly and that got developed at a crappy 1 hour photo place, will have pretty mediocre image quality.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    A lot depends on ISO too of course, which is a probably underappreciated aspect of digital. With 35mm film, you top out at about ISO 400 in B&W with standard chemistry although you can push things to about 1600 (though it shows). With color slides, the latter ISO 100 E6 films were pretty good. Grain and contrast started getting a lot worse much higher than that. Of course, Velvia 50 and Kodachrome 25 (which had about the same effective speed) were better.
  - shard 4y ago
    > 35mm is great up to an 8x10 print. It'll do 11x14 if you don't stand too close. It's 30mp+ of optical resolution. Sure, if you are taking photos of technical drawings or scientific specimens. For artistic purposes, the composition and subject matter much more than resolution. We were regularly blowing up 35mm to 16x20 in photo class, and I've been to photo exhibitions where images such as Steve McCurry's Afghan girl was blown up to five-foot-tall prints.
    - ghaff 4y ago
      And I'm guessing (without researching) that the Afghan girl shot was done using KC25 with a tripod.
whartung 4y ago
Sure, but I know as a consumer, I didn't care. I loved 110 because of the form factor. Tiny, pocketable cameras with tiny, pocketable film. The 4x6s that came from the drug store looked like pictures to me, I never enlarged anything beyond that. I had one of the smallest cameras around and took hundreds of pictures with it. Clearly, not a photography connoisseur, but it met my needs. Especially the later fancy models with the built in strobe flash. (Flash bars and flash cubes kind of didn't work with the form factor.)
- shard 4y ago
  This reminds me of the tiny mechanical camera that I had as a kid for the 110 film format. It was my first camera and I loved that little thing. It looked something like this: https://www.flickr.com/photos/juan-antonio-capo/6981339701/in/photostream https://www.flickr.com/photos/juan-antonio-capo/6981339701/i...

Theodores 4y ago

The problem in the UK was what I call 'bang per buck'. Most magazines had envelopes fall out of them for mail order photo processing. This market was a race to the bottom, with the service becoming a commodity. To keep you coming back there would be a 'free' unexposed reel of film for every reel you sent in. When the new disc films came along there were no upsides in area of film exposed, there was no upgrade path (you could not use the same film in an SLR as a point and shoot fixed focus) and only photographers that worked commercially were in the market for buying film. Most people went for the mail order option or Boots The Chemist, found on every High Street and able to do a quick turnaround at a fair price. The 1980's were also quite expensive when it came to consumer items. We no longer buy cameras 'made in America' and the thought of it is quite unimaginable today, you know straight off the bat that you are not going to be able to afford it. Furthermore, nothing in store was on a 'point of sale' system with retailers knowing exactly how much stock they have. There have been vast efficiency changes over the last forty years. All of this factors into price. On the flip side, the boomers were relatively rich and the difference between rich and poor was not what it is today, hence there was a large customer base in the middle class that could afford these things.

acomjean 4y ago

After they discontinued it, Kodak tried another small film format (aps). More traditional cartridge style and let you shoot different aspect ratios. But smaller file meant worse quality than 35mm. The name “APS” lived on when camera manufacturers used smaller sensors on cameras designed for full frame lenses. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Photo_System https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Photo_System