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The standalone camera market outside of SLRs is too small to make significant impact on Kodak's bottom line. There's also substantial hardware manufacturing in
by snapetom 1y ago
The standalone camera market outside of SLRs is too small to make significant impact on Kodak's bottom line. There's also substantial hardware manufacturing investment that they can't afford to make. Maybe they partner with a manufacturer and license the name with a lot of software control, but at the end of the day, the hardware (and software) costs are going to shave off any substantial profit. High risk, low reward.
Kodak is a chemical company these days with modest profits. They need to double down on that. Cameras are not in their wheelhouse.
- soneil 1y agoI was looking at CIPA stats[0] yesterday. This appears to be a Japanese trade association, so it covers a lot of the biggest names in photography - but not Kodak. But the numbers surprised me much beyond what I thought I already knew. Interchangeable-lens cameras are down from 10.something million units in 2008, to 6.something million units in 2024. But fixed-lens (eg compact, point & shoot, etc) went from 106 million to 1.8 million over the same period. Nokia survived the smartphone better than (non-interchangeable) cameras did. [0] https://www.cipa.jp/e/stats/dc.html https://www.cipa.jp/e/stats/dc.html
- FireBeyond 1y agoI know you meant more "Interchangable Lens Camera" with what you were describing. SLRs are almost dead. Canon has promised a few more lenses (or had), but all their efforts now are in mirrorless. Sony doesn't have a non-mirrorless offering. And I believe Nikon is the same as Canon.
- snapetom 1y agoYes. Interchangeable lenses. ILC just isn't as common in the common vocabulary as SLRs which has been used for decades. Plus, I just have a habit of using the old technology acronym instead of the new one. Like SSL.