The Kodak Disc Camera
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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.
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.
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.
https://i.ibb.co/bPPgvBN/Photo-37-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/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.
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.
I actually wrote an article for CNET when Kodachrome processing was eventually shut down. https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/countdown-to-kodachr...
At the time, usable digital cameras looked like the Kodak F3 back plus shoulder-mounted hard drive in this article: https://www.businessinsider.com/digital-photography-revoluti...
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"
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.
Fuji (although later getting into the X series), did pretty much what Kodak eventually did--mostly applying emulsion and chemical expertise in addition to legacy pro film business plus commercial printing--but, as you say, much smaller and much more insular.
As I've written about in the past, Kodak gets held up as a classic example of "marketing myopia"--see any Marketing 101 textbook. But, for the reasons you cite, Kodak should just have pivoted harder into digital doesn't really hold up.
I used to be an IT industry analyst and, while they were never a particular focus, I did follow what NEC, Fujitsu, and Hitachi did in the server market. My general observation was that they all had aspirations to be global IT suppliers but, for the most part, they didn't want to make any material investments to make that actually happen.
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.
Didn't they hold some early key patents?
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
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://www.imaging-resource.com/PRODS/DC210/DC210Acgi.HTM
https://www.imaging-resource.com/PRODS/DC240/DC240A.HTM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_PowerShot_A#Models
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/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_...
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?
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.
The amount of process and technical knowledge and experience that went into this is absolutely impressive.
What do you think led to such a quick end?
My dad owned a darkroom/photoshop/one-hour lab for about 30 years starting in the 70s. I worked for him for about 5 of those years centered around highschool.
There is absolutely no such thing as a foolproof camera. You would not believe all the ways people can screw up even the most "foolproof" of designs.
As just one example: with a traditional 35 mm camera, the film unspools from its lightproof cartridge onto a take-up spool in the camera. When you reach the end of of the roll, you press a button on the camera to release a clutch, then you turn a knob to rewind the film back into its cartridge before opening the camera back and removing the film.
https://filtergrade.com/load-film-35mm-camera/
One obvious and easy to make error is accidentally opening the camera back before rewinding the film, usually ruining ("fogging") all the pictures you shot. :-(
But what you wouldn't guess someone would be able to do is to rewind the film without releasing the clutch. Doing so requires a large amount of force because you're tearing the sprockets off the side of the film where it travels over the gear that's normally used to advance the film.
Any yet, this is something I saw more than one time. Customers would never admit to doing this, but I mean, come on, we'd open the cartridge to remove the film for development and the sides would have been torn off and there's only one way this happens.
Then there's the questions... no, dropping the exposed film did not blur the images.
Oh right, that machine was supposed to produce photos. You mean I wasn't supposed to open that? Well jokes on you. 7 year olds can't read won't read and won't listen either. Oops.
[1] The one-hour lab equipment we had was semi-automated. The printing machine was about the size of three refrigerators side-by-side. There was a console/desk at one end that I would sit at which had the projection bulb underneath shining up through a small hole over which I'd place each negative one after the next.
The machine had a computer which assumed the colors and exposure in each photo averaged out to an 18% grey image. Looking at the negative, I'd have to punch in offsets: e.g. I'd recognize the image has a lot of sky, or a lot of green foliage, or it's at the beach, etc, or it was over or under exposed, so I'd add "+3 blue" or '+2 green", or whatever I thought was needed to offset from 18% grey, then punch "go". The machine would then expose the negative onto the photo paper above which was on a 4" wide by 1000 foot roll. So it would expose 4" x 6" above, then it would feed the exposed paper into tanks filled with the chemistry to develop the paper. About 12 minutes later (as I recall...) the photos I'd previously exposed would pop out of the machine.
Another employee, or me if it wasn't too busy, would then do quality control. I was pretty good, but some photos I would have misidentified so we'd have to sometimes re-print a few. After we were satisfied with the quality, the photos would all go into a paper envelope and we'd cut the negative roll down from 12, 24, or 36 images into strips of 4 images. Those would go into plastic sleeves and get inserted into the same paper envelope with the photos.
I never really thought about it before, but I guess I've traveled vicariously all over the world through other people's photos. I don't think we ever thought twice about privacy and I don't think our customers did then either. Occasionally someone might mention there were nudes when dropping off a roll, but mostly not.
I vaguely recall we had a customer with a mistress and he would use a different name when dropping off photos that included the mistress because his wife would sometimes come in to pick up the family photos. Okay, one more: a guy who had a new girlfriend every few months and somehow he'd always get his girlfriends to flash the camera. It was amusing because we'd see he had a new girlfriend and knew it would be just a few weeks before he'd have a photo of her flashing her breasts for him. It's been more than 30 years, but those are two I recall.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
That's crazy. I think I will try a darkroom again. It has been 45 years...
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.
Only problem was price (more expensive to buy and process), and availability (hard to find disc film in a country town).
Growing up we had the Kodak Instamatics — perhaps the worst of the lot?
It was a great concept in theory, but as the articles states the picture quality was terrible. Every picture I took was a little bit blurry with over exposed colours and that was after taking them to a processor who had the right equipment. I also tried various different brands and qualities of film, all with the same result.
I have about 80 disc negatives in a cupboard somewhere. I wanted to scan them to JPG, but I couldn't find a DIY scanner that accepts the format without having to cut the frames from the disc and put them in to a 35mm slide mount. There are a few companies that have the means to scan them, but they are pricey - I was quoted €30.00 to scan one disc.
I feel that if Kodak had waited a few years and did a bit more work to increase the formats resolution it might have been more of a success. The small size of disc cameras were their biggest selling point, but that counted for nothing when the image quality was so poor.
From memory the major problem for me was not the picture quality or an lack of features on the camera. It was the cost of film, developing and that it only had a few exposures per disk.
It was just too expensive to run compared to a 35mm camera. A few years later the disposable 35mm cameras came out and that just killed it completely.
That's $182 in 2020 dollars for the base model camera. Not exactly budget minded for something competing against 110 cameras.
I worked in a one-hour photo lab. Disc photos always looked like crap. If you couldn't get a decent photo with the light in Maui, there was no hope.
There are vendors on eBay that specialize in this camera and have literally 100s of cameras in stock.
Early models are all-metal, while later ones incorporate some plastic, but are consequently lighter. At this age, I wouldn't worry about the reliability difference of the two, and simply plan to replace the body if it fails.
The Pentax K-mount has a lot of cheap, good glass. The 50/1.8 is standard and fabulous, the 28/2.8 and 135/4 are also amazing and can be had for under $50.
The camera is entirely manual, with no autofocus or autoexposure available. Optionally, you can put a button cell battery in it to power a simple exposure meter, visible as a needle indicator in the viewfinder.
I've been shooting these for 40 years, so I'm a bit biased, but I do recommend them just for their ubiquity and cheap replaceability.
I now recommend a Pentax MX, the same operation of a K1000 but better in every way. It was a more upscale all mechanical camera from Pentax. If you want a Canon, go for an Fb to Ftb for mechanical cameras or an A1 if you want more automated exposure options.
The best deals are probably the autofocus cameras from the 90s. With a little looking around you can probably find a Minolta XtSI with a 50mm lens for $50 or less. It is small and the lens, like all 50mm, is great. It also has a built in flash and a variety of of auto modes to simplify picture taking. Yes, they are cheap, plastic cameras that will not last a very long time. But you can get then for so cheap it doesn't really matter. The lenses tend to last longer. You can get similar deals on other brands too. Pentax autofocus cameras are super cheap but you can find Canon Rebels by the truckload as well as many Nikon (the N/F80 is my favorite plastic fantastic from them).
You don't even need a light meter really (though they are very helpful), basic rules like sunny-16 will go along way and will help teach you how to judge exposure.
1950-60s rangefinders can be a fun place to start. They've got everything you need, nothing you don't, are full mechanical, and often very cheap.
The most important thing is to get out, learn how film behaves and to learn how to take good photos. Don't get caught in the trap a lot of beginners do worrying about gear to the point they focus on that more than actually using it.
A Nikkormat FT3 or Nikon FM would also be good choices, but I like the compactness of the Olympus.
No it’s not! Pre-Ai Nikon lenses are also made out of toxic metal that will break modern cameras!
First is a FA, fully mechanical and a nice camera. Not sure about availability so.
The second, and already sporting stuff you also find on modern DSLRs, is a Nikon F4. At least over here more or less available, industructible (even half submerged in rain water pictures are great and the camera did not suffer).
Benefit of both is that they work with every F-mount lense Nikon ever made. Not sure about the latest G series without aperture rings, could be the F4 accepts those. And those lenses, if you get the good ones, all work great on Nikon's DSLRs up to the recent D780 and D850. And those lenses are available cheap used since everybody goes mirrorless. With a F4 and a decent set of lenses it is easy to go didgital on a budget, e.g. with a used good condition D700. Full format, feels a lot like a F4, both are professional bodies, and not too expensive.
Invest the difference to mirrorless into travelling to nice places where you can take nice pictures.
Oh, and using film helps improve your photography, if a picture takes time and money to develop you are much more concious about what you shoot.
Damn, now I'm motivated to break out the afore mentioned F4 again and some B+W film...
Edit: If you can get your hands on a Canon EOS1 your good too. It's Canon's F4 equivalant and Canon lenses are great. Canon does have less lens downward conpatability so. Nikon cameras are hefty, you feel what you handle, Canons are lighter and feel, well, not flimsy in comparison but you get the drift. I like hefty, solid cameras, others don't, so ouck your poison.
(Also easy to scan the negatives on a flat-bed scanner rather than having to make prints.)
TLR's can be had fairly inexpensively on eBay (as long as you're not insisting on getting a Hassleblad or a Rollieflex, for example).
Yashica's are still affordable and take excellent photos. Most models are purely mechanical — not even an exposure meter.
https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_trksid=p2380057.m...
A Nikon FM or FM2 for a fully mechanical camera with a light meter.
A Nikon F301 for an overlooked, very cheap but still really good camera.
The Canon A/AE-1 and Pentax K1000 get brought up a lot and are now surprisingly expensive for what they are, there are much better cameras out there for less but that don’t have their name brought up as much.
This is a huge rabbit hole to go down with how many cameras got made but if in doubt seek out someone in person and try to use one before you buy it!
[1]: https://cameraquest.com/voivcmet2.htm
As for camera suggestions, this is where it gets difficult and I know that I did not find the “right” camera for me right away. Initially I shot a digital SLR for about half a decade and while I got better as a photographer, I could never love the device itself and how it “made” me shoot. Got into film with a fairly small 50s Leica that I inherited, moved its 1949 Summitar 50mm lens over to a Bessa R2 after about a year because it has a built-in light metre, had fun with an original (fairly cheap as well!) Olympus XA, and these days I can afford Zeiss glass and a Zeiss Ikon ZM to match. But it sure was a journey and I feel I became a much better digital shooter thanks to it.
So, um… Recommendations? I like small cameras – preferably rangefinders – as they are easy to carry and forces me to work within the compromises they make in terms of flexibility for a given situation. If it was ten years ago, I would have recommended any of the Bessas (produced this millennia, built like tanks, and nearly purely mechanical) with a 50mm or 35mm cheap lens, but Cosina has either stopped or lowered production to a degree where you will struggle to find one at a reasonable price these days.
If you like wide angles (I do not really, as I struggle with anything below 40mm for unknown reasons) there are plenty of fairly cheap consumer and prosumer cameras from the 80s and onward with built-in light metres. My original Olympus XA was cheap and plastic-y as all hell, but oh boy was it small and could pack a punch with some good black and white film (straight from the scanner on good old Neopan 400 [2]). Sadly, if you want a 50mm on such a camera you need to go into the 60s and 70s, where the electronics easily become a bit more iffy. If you are willing to largely forego manual focus, there is also a whole range of cameras like the Fuji Klasse W, Yashica T5, etc. Just beware that some of these goes for crazy amounts of money these days and they are of course packed with electronics.
With all my rambling, I guess in conclusion what I am trying to say is that you perhaps should consider what you already know about yourself and your shooting preferences and go for what is affordable enough to be “a toy” to play around with to get your bearings towards “the right gear”. At least that is how I finally ended up loving the process of shooting both film and digital.
One potential advantage is the ability to use old Nikon lenses on newer digital cameras, but that's of limited utility when trying to use old manual focus lenses on modern bodies that aren't really designed for them.