6 ms·

Story I've shared on HN in the past. In the summer of '83, I did an internship at Kodak. I worked at the Elmgrove facility where the disc cameras were made. Ear

Story I've shared on HN in the past. In the summer of '83, I did an internship at Kodak. I worked at the Elmgrove facility where the disc cameras were made. Early in my stint, I got a plant tour of the building where those cameras were made. The factory was going full bore to keep up with demand. I was in awe of the factory and the level of automation and the sheer size of the machines! There were 18,000 people at that one Kodak facility. Start and end time were staggered in five minute increments to manage car flow. To think at the time that just five years later it would all come to a rather quick end was unthinkable.

intrasight 4y ago
And to add: I've often contemplated an alternative history where Kodak had the foresight to invest those hundreds of millions into digital photograph.
- ghaff 4y ago
  Certainly there was resistance to digital photography within Kodak. But they did some work with digital very early on and PhotoCD was another effort to get into the transition from film to digital. In any case, the early 80s was way too early for consumer digital photography to be practical. But what would Kodak really have brought to digital--especially at the scale to replace their consumables business? After all, Kodak once owned a full chemical company (that they spun off at some point) to provide them with their chemical needs. They didn't have much in the way of semiconductor expertise. Their network of dealers could have (and actually did) provide some ability for consumers to print digital photos early on. It's not like Kodak was making anything other than cameras like this when digital came in. Fujifilm did better with the transition to digital by leveraging their emulsion and chemical expertise. But they still had a rough time of it and were a much smaller company.
  - shuntress 4y ago
    The point is that Kodak was so huge and had such a big head start it didn't matter that they had no direct experience with semiconductors. Decision makers at kodak should have been able to leverage their considerable resources to gain market share with the new technology that would eventually replace their main product. All things considered, they did a pretty good job of scaling down and staying alive. But it's a classic example of "My salary depends on not understanding it"
    - ghaff 4y ago
      Kodak could have gone into any arbitrary new manufacturing business. Heck, they could have invented the smartphone. But besides smartphones, digital photography is not a particularly good business to be in.
      - shuntress 4y ago
        True this is essentially just saying "they could have diversified" but my main point is that they should have diversified into the up-and-coming field where they could claim some expertise. Someone uses precise complicated chemical manufacturing processes that require a deep understanding of color science to produce the millions of sensors in phones, cars, cameras, doorbells, etc. And it's not Kodak.
        shrubble 4y ago
        Kodak did design and make their own sensors. See the mention of the CCD line shutdown here: https://www.imperx.com/latest-news/discontinuation-of-ccd-image-sensors/ https://www.imperx.com/latest-news/discontinuation-of-ccd-im...
      - riffic 4y ago
        wasn't there a recent initiative to pivot into pharmaceutical research or chemicals or something?
        ghaff 4y ago
        They do (and always have done) a lot with chemicals and emulsions only some of which is imaging-related. They also did copiers for a time--which I believe they got out of although they do still have a commercial printing business. I think they also had a healthcare initiative of some sort at one point but they seem to be out of that as well.
      - paulmd 4y ago
        this is, I think, the money shot to my lengthy ramble elsewhere. Digital photography is not a particularly good business to be in, and Kodak had nothing left once you stripped away the film business and the ancillary photopaper/chemical business. If you're going to do it, you want to be in the pro market, you want to be selling the body, you want an extensive first-party library and, ideally, minimal competition from external third-parties (Sigma, Tamron, etc) selling into your system. Kodak had none of that, their only DSLR experience was building "digital conversions" of Nikon bodies (using nikon lenses) and they would have been starting from scratch. Fuji also got really lucky that Japan fucking loves cameras, especially film cameras. Fuji has NEVER given a shit about the world outside japan, other than selling freighter-loads of color negative film (disposable cameras are still extremely popular in the developing world), they give zero shits about marketing their cameras or instant film or anything else outside the Japanese market. Their camera gear (35mm, MF, and LF) has always been top-notch and it just has zero market penetration in the US because they never bothered to market it. It's also routine to have fuji stuff (Astia, FP-100C45, FP-100C, etc) discontinued with like a week of notice to japan, and zero notice to the rest of the world, they have extremely poor organizational communication because they only give a shit about japan. But they never had to, because Japan has had a love affair with photography for 70 years now. When you look at cameras like the Fuji X-series... those are cameras designed for the Japanese domestic market, cause they still love rangefinders. So is the Pentax Q series... americans don't get it, shitty p+s sensor, why would I buy it? you're not meant to, it's a cute little camera for japanese housewives, they just let us buy it too... sometimes.
  - js2 4y ago
    PhotoCD seemed like a pretty half-assed effort and there wasn't really a market for it. There were PhotoCD players but no one really wanted to view their images on a TV. So great, you've digitized your photo, now what? People just weren't sharing their images digitally yet. But anyway, my dad tried to sell them in his shop, and I transferred 100 of my favorite images at the time to PhotoCD in 1993. Here's a few: https://i.ibb.co/bPPgvBN/Photo-37-of-100.jpg https://i.ibb.co/bPPgvBN/Photo-37-of-100.jpg https://i.ibb.co/G5r08cY/Photo-50-of-100.jpg https://i.ibb.co/G5r08cY/Photo-50-of-100.jpg https://i.ibb.co/X2nPJgT/Photo-74-of-100.jpg https://i.ibb.co/X2nPJgT/Photo-74-of-100.jpg https://i.ibb.co/n1pTKC8/Photo-92-of-100.jpg https://i.ibb.co/n1pTKC8/Photo-92-of-100.jpg Probably shot on Kodak Gold 100 color negative with a Nikon FE2. Gosh I suddenly miss the smell of film.
    - ghaff 4y ago
      I got a few PhotoCDs made when I first got a CD drive for my computer. PhotoCDs probably came from a place where the TV was a central fixture in many households and it probably seemed like a logical extension to how many people would have slideshows of their holiday slides. I think there was a certain baked-in assumption by Kodak and others that the digitization of photography would still look a lot like how photographs were taken and shared in the film world.
      - js2 4y ago
        > How many people would have slideshows of their holiday slides. I have suffered through more than my fair share of those. > I think there was a certain baked-in assumption by Kodak and others that the digitization of photography would still look a lot like how photographs were taken and shared in the film world. I don't have any hard numbers, but at my dad's shop we probably sold and developed 95%+ negatives vs slides. We did so little E6 (much less Kodachrome) that we didn't even bother with it in-house. Most photos were shot on negative and shared as prints, not shot on slide and shared as slide shows. So if PhotoCD was supposed to take the place of a slide projector, it was already a losing proposition. To this day, I have my favorite digital photos printed, as do my family members. There's something more intimate about passing around a photo album than sitting in front of a display. I think PhotoCD was one of those things that was too early since there wasn't demand for sharing digitally yet, and then too late once digital cameras came out and made digitizing film unnecessary.
- hotpotamus 4y ago
  I was under the impression that Kodak more or less invented the digital camera and then sat on it. Digital cameras never offered the kind of recurring revenue of film, paper, and chemistry and really only had about a decade as a consumer product before phones replaced them as far as I can tell. It's hard to imagine Kodak ever really making it through that.
  - StrictDabbler 4y ago
    Also they were always 8% behind the market because they were running on Cotsworth's 13-month International Fixed Calendar. Mostly joking, but it does suggest a pretty isolated internal company culture... they planned projects and billed based on different months than the entire rest of the world. Wild.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    Yeah. Imagine Kodak came out with a good mass market digital camera as soon as it was feasible to do so--so sometime in the late 90s. There's no particular reason they could have accelerated the development compared to all the other companies designing digital cameras. And as you say, it was only about 10 years until the smartphone came out. Beating Nikon and Canon at their own came would have been a big change in strategy and they've been shrinking in any case.
    - CamperBob2 4y ago
      There's no particular reason they could have accelerated the development compared to all the other companies designing digital cameras. Didn't they hold some early key patents?
      - paulmd 4y ago
        (sorry, long comment!) Probably. They invented the digital camera for the KEYHOLE/KENNEN/CRYSTAL satellite series in the 70s, there’s undoubtedly some patents that came with it. But, what would you have even done with a digital image in 1975? Showed it around the family Christmas party on your laptop? About 20 years too early for that. Even in 1991 when they got serious about professional digital imaging, a DSLR came with a little suitcase attached with electronics and storage and batteries. Even in the professional market there was no interest in a shitty 1.3 megapixel image when a film camera was shooting the equivalent of a 30-40 megapixel image (using optical enlargement not scanning), nobody would want to take that kind of hit unless you needed images right now, ie news crews and military. They sold less than 1k units, at a cost of $20k per unit (in 1991 dollars!). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodak_DCS_100 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodak_DCS_100 By the time the market was ready for consumer digital cameras, in the late 90s/early 2000s, they did indeed explore that market (eg DC 210 point-and-shoot), and it was already a low-margin market and becoming lower all the time. That market instantly became a race to the bottom and by about 2004 it was already completely commoditized. I remember the Canon A40 being hot shit for a point and shoot, a couple gens later and it was just the same design rehashed over and over again, undoubtedly with margins getting thinner every time around. Look at the full Canon model list and you can see by the time the A410 comes out (around 2004-2005) the models stop because the market is just dead. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodak_DC_Series https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodak_DC_Series https://www.imaging-resource.com/PRODS/DC210/DC210Acgi.HTM https://www.imaging-resource.com/PRODS/DC210/DC210Acgi.HTM https://www.imaging-resource.com/PRODS/DC240/DC240A.HTM https://www.imaging-resource.com/PRODS/DC240/DC240A.HTM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_PowerShot_A#Models https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_PowerShot_A#Models https://www.imaging-resource.com/PRODS/A40/A40A.HTM https://www.imaging-resource.com/PRODS/A40/A40A.HTM “Kodak should have done more with digital!” is a super easy thing to say, but, what specifically should they have done that they didn’t already do, and when should they have done it? It does seem like they could have done more, or marketed better, or something, but it’s not as obvious as people think it is. It might be instructive to look at the efforts of Nikon or Minolta (eg the RD-175) by comparison and nobody else was doing significantly better than that. That was 1995, four years after Kodak went to market with their first commercial DSLR for the pro market, and four years before Kodak got serious about consumer cameras. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minolta_RD-175 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minolta_RD-175 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikon_E_series https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikon_E_series The only real answer I can think of is that they should have gone harder in this market - the pro market where the margins were better. But Kodak was never Nikon, they had some high-end models in the 40s and 50s (Kodak Medalist, Retina series, Ektra series, and their pro MF/LF lens line) but they pretty much exited the pro market by the mid 50s, and that was before SLRs really took off. They were a consumer company and didn't have the SLR experience that, say, Nikon and Canon did to make that pivot. They didn't have the pro user-base with tons of lenses to lock users into the system, they didn't have the service network (not film but pro-tier camera/lens service), etc. Nobody in the pro market thought "kodak" at all, let alone in the SLRs, all of their prior stuff was Kodak electronics grafted to Nikon bodies, they had zero experience at building the SLR body itself, zero lens library (again the nikon bodies used Nikon lenses), etc. They would have been starting from scratch the same as any other chemical company that wanted to start building cameras. It’s an extremely unsatisfying answer but generally the market operated efficiently here and other companies that were better suited to doing digital won the race. Kodak had no particular electronics or semiconductor expertise, they were a chemical company and a (low-end consumer junk[0]) camera company, not software or electronics. They didn’t pivot (because it didn’t make sense to pivot to a low margin market like that) and then died. It sucks and maybe they could have leveraged their brand and network better... but what specifically? [0]: and I'm not throwing shade about it, the best camera is the one you have at hand and can afford to shoot, but, nobody is reminiscing fondly about the image quality of the Kodak Pony 135 or the Instamatic, either... Kodak's model was to get the camera into people's hands and get them shooting and sell them the film, and the cameras were junk starting from about 1960 onwards. Cheap vacuum-formed plastic or bakelite, and maybe a glass doublet for the lens, otherwise plastic doublet. 90% of everything is crap and kodak's cameras post-1960 fall into that bucket, they are NOT the ones that are going up in value again these days lol. https://camerapedia.fandom.com/wiki/Kodak_Pony_828/135#Pony_135 https://camerapedia.fandom.com/wiki/Kodak_Pony_828/135#Pony_... And once you take away the film business, and the photo paper business (for optical prints, eg RA-4 process)... there's nothing left of Kodak. They never made SLRs, just digital conversions for Nikon's bodies. How do you pivot from that?
- chiph 4y ago
  I had a Kodak DC260 - not quite 2 megapixels resolution, but had optical zoom with autofocus, used a compact flash card for storage, and ate AA batteries like they were candy. Connectivity was USB, IrDA (infrared), and analog video (NTSC/PAL). What many people didn't know is that it came with several SDKs. 1) It had a scripting language that ran on the camera, 2) Visual Basic 4 or 5, and 3) VBA for Office applications, so you could do something like automate employee ID badge creation. Honestly, I don't know what they could have done to make up the loss of recurring consumable revenue in the digital world beyond what they already did with Kodak branded photo paper, Kodak branded memory cards, and Kodak branded accessories like lanyards and bags.
- GeneT45 4y ago
  My first digital camera was a Kodak. Purchased around '97(?) for the princely sum of $1000. It was 1.1Mp IIRC and took excellent photos for the time. It also consumed AA batteries with the same alacrity that its ancestors consumed film.
- underwater 4y ago
  In that timeline Kodak makes an unbelievably massive pivot from being a chemical company to being a digital camera company, dominate throughout the 90s and into the 2000s, and then get absolutely smashed by Apple in the 2010s.
foobiekr 4y ago
I had one of these Disc cameras as a kid. I am really thankful for it, not because I have a single photo from that period, but because it was a direct and very educational example of marketing. I credit the Kodak Disc Camera with teaching me not to be so easily manipulated by marketing, a lesson that has served me very well.
- inatreecrown2 4y ago
  ha, same for me :-)
kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
I was there in the early 2000s when the building was being cleaned out to create office spaces. I distinctly remember a hallway filled with teletypes headed out for scrap/salvage.
gregmac 4y ago
Different technology, but Destin from Smarter every day did an interesting factory tour [1] of their film making process. Despite the factory being fairy old, there's an impressive level of engineering, automation and other tech involved. Things like their film coating machines having an isolated, heavy floor that's directly connected to bedrock, miles of drying machines that never physically touch the film, or the giant screw used to generate heat by friction to create the film base. The amount of process and technical knowledge and experience that went into this is absolutely impressive. [1] https://youtu.be/HQKy1KJpSVc https://youtu.be/HQKy1KJpSVc
- agumonkey 4y ago
  Yes, the scale and techniques involved were super interesting. It's out of the light but far from boring.
Xx25 4y ago
Thanks for sharing your experience. >To think at the time that just five years later it would all come to a rather quick end was unthinkable. What do you think led to such a quick end?
- intrasight 4y ago
  My opinion is that the powerful decision makers were about to retire - so they just didn't much care.
_glass 4y ago
Slightly unrelated, but early in my career I brushed off those tours as not really useful for my developer job. Mostly because I got indoctrinated by my computer science profs that it's all data flow in the end. Don't concentrate on what's behind. Even though I still think it is to some extend true to remind yourself to abstract away the meaning for the business, the real reason for those tours are so different: They are memories for life. This is how you become a fully formed human in our society. One of the perks of being a tech consultant was really to get to know so many different life worlds of people working in different sectors.
- intrasight 4y ago
  One of my early jobs was as a consultant in a early software company which had great traction in data visualization. I worked on dozens of projects over a five year period, and got to go see some utterly amazing things on-site in military, space, shipping, manufacturing, nuclear, etc. industries. Good advice for the next generation is to take every opportunity to go see the physical plan where things really happen.

intrasight 4y ago

And to add: I've often contemplated an alternative history where Kodak had the foresight to invest those hundreds of millions into digital photograph.

ghaff 4y ago
Certainly there was resistance to digital photography within Kodak. But they did some work with digital very early on and PhotoCD was another effort to get into the transition from film to digital. In any case, the early 80s was way too early for consumer digital photography to be practical. But what would Kodak really have brought to digital--especially at the scale to replace their consumables business? After all, Kodak once owned a full chemical company (that they spun off at some point) to provide them with their chemical needs. They didn't have much in the way of semiconductor expertise. Their network of dealers could have (and actually did) provide some ability for consumers to print digital photos early on. It's not like Kodak was making anything other than cameras like this when digital came in. Fujifilm did better with the transition to digital by leveraging their emulsion and chemical expertise. But they still had a rough time of it and were a much smaller company.
- shuntress 4y ago
  The point is that Kodak was so huge and had such a big head start it didn't matter that they had no direct experience with semiconductors. Decision makers at kodak should have been able to leverage their considerable resources to gain market share with the new technology that would eventually replace their main product. All things considered, they did a pretty good job of scaling down and staying alive. But it's a classic example of "My salary depends on not understanding it"
  - ghaff 4y ago
    Kodak could have gone into any arbitrary new manufacturing business. Heck, they could have invented the smartphone. But besides smartphones, digital photography is not a particularly good business to be in.
    - shuntress 4y ago
      True this is essentially just saying "they could have diversified" but my main point is that they should have diversified into the up-and-coming field where they could claim some expertise. Someone uses precise complicated chemical manufacturing processes that require a deep understanding of color science to produce the millions of sensors in phones, cars, cameras, doorbells, etc. And it's not Kodak.
      - shrubble 4y ago
        Kodak did design and make their own sensors. See the mention of the CCD line shutdown here: https://www.imperx.com/latest-news/discontinuation-of-ccd-image-sensors/ https://www.imperx.com/latest-news/discontinuation-of-ccd-im...
    - riffic 4y ago
      wasn't there a recent initiative to pivot into pharmaceutical research or chemicals or something?
      - ghaff 4y ago
        They do (and always have done) a lot with chemicals and emulsions only some of which is imaging-related. They also did copiers for a time--which I believe they got out of although they do still have a commercial printing business. I think they also had a healthcare initiative of some sort at one point but they seem to be out of that as well.
    - paulmd 4y ago
      this is, I think, the money shot to my lengthy ramble elsewhere. Digital photography is not a particularly good business to be in, and Kodak had nothing left once you stripped away the film business and the ancillary photopaper/chemical business. If you're going to do it, you want to be in the pro market, you want to be selling the body, you want an extensive first-party library and, ideally, minimal competition from external third-parties (Sigma, Tamron, etc) selling into your system. Kodak had none of that, their only DSLR experience was building "digital conversions" of Nikon bodies (using nikon lenses) and they would have been starting from scratch. Fuji also got really lucky that Japan fucking loves cameras, especially film cameras. Fuji has NEVER given a shit about the world outside japan, other than selling freighter-loads of color negative film (disposable cameras are still extremely popular in the developing world), they give zero shits about marketing their cameras or instant film or anything else outside the Japanese market. Their camera gear (35mm, MF, and LF) has always been top-notch and it just has zero market penetration in the US because they never bothered to market it. It's also routine to have fuji stuff (Astia, FP-100C45, FP-100C, etc) discontinued with like a week of notice to japan, and zero notice to the rest of the world, they have extremely poor organizational communication because they only give a shit about japan. But they never had to, because Japan has had a love affair with photography for 70 years now. When you look at cameras like the Fuji X-series... those are cameras designed for the Japanese domestic market, cause they still love rangefinders. So is the Pentax Q series... americans don't get it, shitty p+s sensor, why would I buy it? you're not meant to, it's a cute little camera for japanese housewives, they just let us buy it too... sometimes.
- js2 4y ago
  PhotoCD seemed like a pretty half-assed effort and there wasn't really a market for it. There were PhotoCD players but no one really wanted to view their images on a TV. So great, you've digitized your photo, now what? People just weren't sharing their images digitally yet. But anyway, my dad tried to sell them in his shop, and I transferred 100 of my favorite images at the time to PhotoCD in 1993. Here's a few: https://i.ibb.co/bPPgvBN/Photo-37-of-100.jpg https://i.ibb.co/bPPgvBN/Photo-37-of-100.jpg https://i.ibb.co/G5r08cY/Photo-50-of-100.jpg https://i.ibb.co/G5r08cY/Photo-50-of-100.jpg https://i.ibb.co/X2nPJgT/Photo-74-of-100.jpg https://i.ibb.co/X2nPJgT/Photo-74-of-100.jpg https://i.ibb.co/n1pTKC8/Photo-92-of-100.jpg https://i.ibb.co/n1pTKC8/Photo-92-of-100.jpg Probably shot on Kodak Gold 100 color negative with a Nikon FE2. Gosh I suddenly miss the smell of film.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    I got a few PhotoCDs made when I first got a CD drive for my computer. PhotoCDs probably came from a place where the TV was a central fixture in many households and it probably seemed like a logical extension to how many people would have slideshows of their holiday slides. I think there was a certain baked-in assumption by Kodak and others that the digitization of photography would still look a lot like how photographs were taken and shared in the film world.
    - js2 4y ago
      > How many people would have slideshows of their holiday slides. I have suffered through more than my fair share of those. > I think there was a certain baked-in assumption by Kodak and others that the digitization of photography would still look a lot like how photographs were taken and shared in the film world. I don't have any hard numbers, but at my dad's shop we probably sold and developed 95%+ negatives vs slides. We did so little E6 (much less Kodachrome) that we didn't even bother with it in-house. Most photos were shot on negative and shared as prints, not shot on slide and shared as slide shows. So if PhotoCD was supposed to take the place of a slide projector, it was already a losing proposition. To this day, I have my favorite digital photos printed, as do my family members. There's something more intimate about passing around a photo album than sitting in front of a display. I think PhotoCD was one of those things that was too early since there wasn't demand for sharing digitally yet, and then too late once digital cameras came out and made digitizing film unnecessary.
hotpotamus 4y ago
I was under the impression that Kodak more or less invented the digital camera and then sat on it. Digital cameras never offered the kind of recurring revenue of film, paper, and chemistry and really only had about a decade as a consumer product before phones replaced them as far as I can tell. It's hard to imagine Kodak ever really making it through that.
- StrictDabbler 4y ago
  Also they were always 8% behind the market because they were running on Cotsworth's 13-month International Fixed Calendar. Mostly joking, but it does suggest a pretty isolated internal company culture... they planned projects and billed based on different months than the entire rest of the world. Wild.
- ghaff 4y ago
  Yeah. Imagine Kodak came out with a good mass market digital camera as soon as it was feasible to do so--so sometime in the late 90s. There's no particular reason they could have accelerated the development compared to all the other companies designing digital cameras. And as you say, it was only about 10 years until the smartphone came out. Beating Nikon and Canon at their own came would have been a big change in strategy and they've been shrinking in any case.
  - CamperBob2 4y ago
    There's no particular reason they could have accelerated the development compared to all the other companies designing digital cameras. Didn't they hold some early key patents?
    - paulmd 4y ago
      (sorry, long comment!) Probably. They invented the digital camera for the KEYHOLE/KENNEN/CRYSTAL satellite series in the 70s, there’s undoubtedly some patents that came with it. But, what would you have even done with a digital image in 1975? Showed it around the family Christmas party on your laptop? About 20 years too early for that. Even in 1991 when they got serious about professional digital imaging, a DSLR came with a little suitcase attached with electronics and storage and batteries. Even in the professional market there was no interest in a shitty 1.3 megapixel image when a film camera was shooting the equivalent of a 30-40 megapixel image (using optical enlargement not scanning), nobody would want to take that kind of hit unless you needed images right now, ie news crews and military. They sold less than 1k units, at a cost of $20k per unit (in 1991 dollars!). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodak_DCS_100 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodak_DCS_100 By the time the market was ready for consumer digital cameras, in the late 90s/early 2000s, they did indeed explore that market (eg DC 210 point-and-shoot), and it was already a low-margin market and becoming lower all the time. That market instantly became a race to the bottom and by about 2004 it was already completely commoditized. I remember the Canon A40 being hot shit for a point and shoot, a couple gens later and it was just the same design rehashed over and over again, undoubtedly with margins getting thinner every time around. Look at the full Canon model list and you can see by the time the A410 comes out (around 2004-2005) the models stop because the market is just dead. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodak_DC_Series https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodak_DC_Series https://www.imaging-resource.com/PRODS/DC210/DC210Acgi.HTM https://www.imaging-resource.com/PRODS/DC210/DC210Acgi.HTM https://www.imaging-resource.com/PRODS/DC240/DC240A.HTM https://www.imaging-resource.com/PRODS/DC240/DC240A.HTM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_PowerShot_A#Models https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_PowerShot_A#Models https://www.imaging-resource.com/PRODS/A40/A40A.HTM https://www.imaging-resource.com/PRODS/A40/A40A.HTM “Kodak should have done more with digital!” is a super easy thing to say, but, what specifically should they have done that they didn’t already do, and when should they have done it? It does seem like they could have done more, or marketed better, or something, but it’s not as obvious as people think it is. It might be instructive to look at the efforts of Nikon or Minolta (eg the RD-175) by comparison and nobody else was doing significantly better than that. That was 1995, four years after Kodak went to market with their first commercial DSLR for the pro market, and four years before Kodak got serious about consumer cameras. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minolta_RD-175 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minolta_RD-175 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikon_E_series https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikon_E_series The only real answer I can think of is that they should have gone harder in this market - the pro market where the margins were better. But Kodak was never Nikon, they had some high-end models in the 40s and 50s (Kodak Medalist, Retina series, Ektra series, and their pro MF/LF lens line) but they pretty much exited the pro market by the mid 50s, and that was before SLRs really took off. They were a consumer company and didn't have the SLR experience that, say, Nikon and Canon did to make that pivot. They didn't have the pro user-base with tons of lenses to lock users into the system, they didn't have the service network (not film but pro-tier camera/lens service), etc. Nobody in the pro market thought "kodak" at all, let alone in the SLRs, all of their prior stuff was Kodak electronics grafted to Nikon bodies, they had zero experience at building the SLR body itself, zero lens library (again the nikon bodies used Nikon lenses), etc. They would have been starting from scratch the same as any other chemical company that wanted to start building cameras. It’s an extremely unsatisfying answer but generally the market operated efficiently here and other companies that were better suited to doing digital won the race. Kodak had no particular electronics or semiconductor expertise, they were a chemical company and a (low-end consumer junk[0]) camera company, not software or electronics. They didn’t pivot (because it didn’t make sense to pivot to a low margin market like that) and then died. It sucks and maybe they could have leveraged their brand and network better... but what specifically? [0]: and I'm not throwing shade about it, the best camera is the one you have at hand and can afford to shoot, but, nobody is reminiscing fondly about the image quality of the Kodak Pony 135 or the Instamatic, either... Kodak's model was to get the camera into people's hands and get them shooting and sell them the film, and the cameras were junk starting from about 1960 onwards. Cheap vacuum-formed plastic or bakelite, and maybe a glass doublet for the lens, otherwise plastic doublet. 90% of everything is crap and kodak's cameras post-1960 fall into that bucket, they are NOT the ones that are going up in value again these days lol. https://camerapedia.fandom.com/wiki/Kodak_Pony_828/135#Pony_135 https://camerapedia.fandom.com/wiki/Kodak_Pony_828/135#Pony_... And once you take away the film business, and the photo paper business (for optical prints, eg RA-4 process)... there's nothing left of Kodak. They never made SLRs, just digital conversions for Nikon's bodies. How do you pivot from that?
chiph 4y ago
I had a Kodak DC260 - not quite 2 megapixels resolution, but had optical zoom with autofocus, used a compact flash card for storage, and ate AA batteries like they were candy. Connectivity was USB, IrDA (infrared), and analog video (NTSC/PAL). What many people didn't know is that it came with several SDKs. 1) It had a scripting language that ran on the camera, 2) Visual Basic 4 or 5, and 3) VBA for Office applications, so you could do something like automate employee ID badge creation. Honestly, I don't know what they could have done to make up the loss of recurring consumable revenue in the digital world beyond what they already did with Kodak branded photo paper, Kodak branded memory cards, and Kodak branded accessories like lanyards and bags.
GeneT45 4y ago
My first digital camera was a Kodak. Purchased around '97(?) for the princely sum of $1000. It was 1.1Mp IIRC and took excellent photos for the time. It also consumed AA batteries with the same alacrity that its ancestors consumed film.
underwater 4y ago
In that timeline Kodak makes an unbelievably massive pivot from being a chemical company to being a digital camera company, dominate throughout the 90s and into the 2000s, and then get absolutely smashed by Apple in the 2010s.

foobiekr 4y ago

I had one of these Disc cameras as a kid. I am really thankful for it, not because I have a single photo from that period, but because it was a direct and very educational example of marketing. I credit the Kodak Disc Camera with teaching me not to be so easily manipulated by marketing, a lesson that has served me very well.

inatreecrown2 4y ago
ha, same for me :-)

kevin_thibedeau 4y ago

I was there in the early 2000s when the building was being cleaned out to create office spaces. I distinctly remember a hallway filled with teletypes headed out for scrap/salvage.

gregmac 4y ago

Different technology, but Destin from Smarter every day did an interesting factory tour [1] of their film making process. Despite the factory being fairy old, there's an impressive level of engineering, automation and other tech involved. Things like their film coating machines having an isolated, heavy floor that's directly connected to bedrock, miles of drying machines that never physically touch the film, or the giant screw used to generate heat by friction to create the film base. The amount of process and technical knowledge and experience that went into this is absolutely impressive. [1] https://youtu.be/HQKy1KJpSVc https://youtu.be/HQKy1KJpSVc

agumonkey 4y ago
Yes, the scale and techniques involved were super interesting. It's out of the light but far from boring.

Xx25 4y ago

Thanks for sharing your experience. >To think at the time that just five years later it would all come to a rather quick end was unthinkable. What do you think led to such a quick end?

intrasight 4y ago
My opinion is that the powerful decision makers were about to retire - so they just didn't much care.

_glass 4y ago

Slightly unrelated, but early in my career I brushed off those tours as not really useful for my developer job. Mostly because I got indoctrinated by my computer science profs that it's all data flow in the end. Don't concentrate on what's behind. Even though I still think it is to some extend true to remind yourself to abstract away the meaning for the business, the real reason for those tours are so different: They are memories for life. This is how you become a fully formed human in our society. One of the perks of being a tech consultant was really to get to know so many different life worlds of people working in different sectors.

intrasight 4y ago
One of my early jobs was as a consultant in a early software company which had great traction in data visualization. I worked on dozens of projects over a five year period, and got to go see some utterly amazing things on-site in military, space, shipping, manufacturing, nuclear, etc. industries. Good advice for the next generation is to take every opportunity to go see the physical plan where things really happen.