We Had No Idea (the first digital camera) | Hacker News Reader

We Had No Idea (the first digital camera)

pluggedin.kodak.com

97 pointseduardoflores39 comments

Film business - dead from Digital Cameras - time taken ~7 years from first affordable high quality cameras. Music Distribution business (cds/vinyls in shops) - death throes from Digital Music players - time taken ~7 years from first affordable high quality mp3 players. Newspaper business - first models of viable media devices (Kindle, iPad) now viable - gone by 2015?

Well I can still buy 35mm film, and vinyl records, and CDs and DVDs. So no print won't be gone in 2015, but it will likely be a shadow of its former self.

Isn't it already?

That's pretty much the point. Film exists, but it's much more of a niche market now, instead of being the only market. And Polaroid and Kodachrome at least are wholly dead, barring imitators.

Print won't die, just like stone carving and thatching. There will always be some market. Might it lose the dominant market status though? To some degree (ease, storage, etc), I hope so. To others, (book trades, notes, no cord) I hope not. We'll see.

'Dead' means 'dead as a way of making bulk money'. There will always be specialist businesses dealing with old technology.

Painting, sheet music and writing are unlikely to die a sudden death any time soon, as they're the only ways of achieving their aims with one's bare hands.

Print media nicely bridges the gap, and whilst I'm sure that volumes are going to decrease, /why/ would it ever disappear?

Stats: First six months of 2010, 112 million CD albums sold, 42 million download albums sold, 600 million CD singles sold (~60 million album equivalent) [1] so it's about 50/50 on digital music. Physical music distribution is not it it's death throes. Also, the decline is slowing, and the market is fairly saturated.

The thing that killed film cameras is that digital cameras just work better and have at least one killer feature -- Instant review. That is a massive advantage for consumer and professional alike. Once the disadvantages were moore's lawed away -- quality for professionals and price, size and printing for consumers -- film could not stand.

There is no killer feature with download music. I can get it faster, but so what? It might grasp the fashion markets, but not everyone needs music now. It has added no killer feature and it's not even cheaper. And one thing that's not like all the others -- it's a worse product. Most people have a CD player in their house and their car. And their computer. And their friends have CD players †. And they can play their CD's everywhere, and they can rip them and put them on portable devices, and they can display them in their living rooms.

Newspapers - physicality is nice, but I can well see them disappearing, because digital news will be more convenient, cheaper and more up-to-date. The winners will be the digital newspapers that preserve or enhance the paper reading experience, which might not mean having reporters and so on, but will mean selecting and presenting information in a way people value (in particular, mirroring the reader's values. It just occurred to me that the Daily Mirror in the UK is the best (and most ironically) named newspaper ever.)

[1] http://www.prosoundnews.com/blog/30154

† iPod docks in hifis and cars are getting penetration, but are not standard yet, and certainly not ubiquitous. Fixing this will be one thing that kills physical music.

Point taken that it's too early to lay flowers at the grave of physical music - but would you invest in a shopping mall music store? I've seen a lot of them close down.

The killer feature with downloadable music is (virtually) unlimited storage, and having your entire collection with you in one device. It won't be long before cars don't have CD players (it's 10 years since they dropped cassette players, and it was about 5 years while they had both). I would say iPod docks in cars are already ubitiquous - most car reviews in magazines will mention if there is one or not, and journalists usually moan if there isn't.

I also disagree with the thought that displaying in living rooms and swapping with friends is a feature. I put all my old CDs in a box years ago. It's only music tragics that want everyone to see their collection.

The thing is, the biggest consumers of music are young people. Try and find a 17 year old with a CD player. As this demographic moves through life, CDs will shrink into niche stores just like print films.

Downloadable music will also die. Spotify, or equivalent streaming services, have the clear killer feature downloadable music is missing - access to all music on any machine with an internet connection. Carrying around your data will seem antiquated really soon.

Edit: For the US readers I'd like to clarify that I don't count any other existing services as equal to Spotify, but there will surely be copycats soon. It is the iphone of streaming music applications if you like analogies.

I'm one of the 9 million new yorkers who take the subway to work every morning and work in midtown. If I had to rely on a net connection for music, photos, etc I would be without a great deal of the day. (During transit, at 5pm, in some office buildings.)

I also don't like the idea of renting, music, property or otherwise.

How long before Subway trains start getting dedicated wi-fi?

Memory will always be cheaper than bandwidth and far more pervasive. It makes no sense to download something, then 10 minutes download it again. We already have pervasive non-downloadable streams - it's called radio. It's still popular, but has never completely displaced having your own collection.

One of the killer uses of digital music is the ability to have a miles-long playlist for long road/plane trips. Downloadable streams cannot possibly service this market cheaper than a solid-state memory device. Wherever you have a market segment that needs two devices, the one that combines both always wins. So the future is an iPod that can stream if necessary - which we already have in the iPhone.

Your comparison between CD and digital sales isn't perfect, because most of the digital music out there is pirated, not purchased. How is that eating into CD sales?

There is no killer feature with download music.

Not true. The killer feature for downloads is that you get the content immediately. The difference is that the photography industry didn't deem their loss of control illegal.

That is not a killer feature. It may be a major benefit, but nothing like the step-change that digital cameras were. Think about taking photos at say a wedding, or a fashion shoot, or a birthday party -- how do you know when you've got the perfect shot on a film camera? You don't.

Getting music in 24 minutes or 24 seconds as opposed to 24 hours is not a killer feature. I think another thread hit it with spotify though -- the killer thing will be when you can just play any piece of music on anything and not have to worry about transporting something physical at all. It'll be great, but tricky to price.

I wonder if these guys would have gotten funding in today's corporate world, showing off that clunky device! It seems like this is a good example of the kind of leap that management needs to be able to take to see the potential of research work. We've all been so habituated to expecting "the world of tomorrow, today" that now researchers have to get a lot closer to productization (especially with respect to aesthetics) for higher-ups to "get it".

It sounds like they didn't get funding in the corporate world of 1976.

>Although we attempted to address the last question by applying Moore’s law to our architecture (15 to 20 years to reach the consumer), we had no idea how to answer these or the many other challenges that were suggested by this approach. An internal report was written and a patent was granted on this concept in 1978 (US 4,131,919).

That seems to be as far as Kodak took it until digital cameras really started to eat their lunch.

Not really, Kodak where at the forefront of large low noise CCDs in the early 90s. They had industrial chips that wiped the floor with a lot of the science CCD suppliers. The first pro digital cameras where from Kodak, or had a Kodak CCD inside.

In fairness I'm not sure they should have gotten funding. While this is amazing in retrospect it was completely inviable in 1976 (the year Apple was founded). The digital photo revolution that followed was reliant on Personal Computers, GUIs, cheap memory and a many other things that wouldn't appear for decades.

The idea was just too far ahead of its time (though I suppose they could have been the most successful patent trolls of all time had they pursued it)

By the time the technology became viable, the patent had expired, or was close to it. Of course, they could have tried to build a collection of auxillary patents around it later.

It seems kind of pointless to take a patent on something even /you/ think will only become big in 15-20 years...

The small chance of licensing the patent later is all the incentive Kodak had for putting money into this project.

You just seem better off keeping your research secret for 10-15 years, and /then/ taking the patent.

The point of the patent system is to encourage inventors to publish their inventions without fear of having the idea stolen.

Odd. I always thought it was litigation.

Well, you thought wrong. Patents were intended (and, for the longest time, worked quite well) as a trade between inventors and society: the inventor gets a legal 20 year monopoly on using his invention, and the rest of the world learns how exactly it works so that they can use it freely afterwards.

sorry, forgot the sarcasm tags.

But the whole idea of my comment was that patents expire in 20 years!

Then again you run the risk of someone else beating you to the patent. I love those stories about how the famous creator/inventor of [some idea or device] published the discovery an hour/day/week before someone else.

That's correct, but you run the risk of someone else patenting the idea first. So it's risky - but could pay off if you invent something far ahead of its time.

Since a patent lasts 17 years (give or take various exceptions), I think the point is that taking one out 17+ years in advance is sort of silly, specifically because of the time lag.

I'd suggest that it's still worthwhile just to make sure that someone else doesn't file it; it's better to have something like this publicly available so nobody can sue you, even without the monopoly, rather than run the risk of getting it patented by someone else and then have to litigate the prior art.

But if you have developed something truly ahead of the state-of-the-art, disclosing it gives your competitors a leg-up.

Another problem with patenting it is that it gets more expensive to maintain each year (there are increasing annual fees), so by the end, the total expense would be enormous; hard to justify if there is zero revenue coming in. [I'm going by Australian law here, assuming US is the same] Hmmm..... I wonder if this means that many patents "on the books" have actually expired for this reason, before the full 17/20 years?

Good rule of thumb for any tech development (including startups) - if you're working on an idea, someone else is also working on exactly that idea.

Of course, that won't be true in many cases. The patent is there for the times that it is.

That doesn't matter if the technology is very unlikely to be commercialized within the lifetime of a patent, does it? Even if the other party takes the time and expense to file the patent, you both still end up with zero.

A legal framework for invalidating other people's independent discoveries? Sounds like a great idea.

"Ay, there's the rub" - Hamlet Act III Scene i

It's an interesting achievement, but as far as I understand, all technologies demonstrated in this prototype were already used on satellites by this time.

Was that satellite technology classified? IIRC the military also invented digital audio and public-key crypto but these inventions weren't publicly known until decades later by which time they had been reinvented by civilians.

if you look at many inventions we use today...they were actually invented decades before they started getting used by consumers.

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