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Comment by rglover | Hacker News Reader

Would love to see Kodak do a hail mary on a camera that looks as thin/clean as an iPhone, gives you same or better camera quality, BUT has the absolute best UX around getting your photos transferred, printed, archived (as I upload stuff from the camera, send me permanent backup dvds for an added fee) etc.

Could also offer little software upgrades in the form of filter packs, plugins/add-ons, etc. I can use it to take normal photos, do 4k-8k video, stream direct from the camera, etc. Make it the most versatile camera known to man, all at an affordable price of like ~$299.

Call it the Kodak Moment to piggyback on the existing tagline and you've at the very least got a successful flash in the pan hipster product.

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Who is the target market for this?

How many people want a device that's the same form factor of a phone and has all of the same photo features of that phone? Why not just use the phone that most people already carry around? It doesn't seem like there would be many people who want their pictures mailed to them on DVD that don't already know how to download pictures from their phone.

Kodak make exceptional film that no one else makes, or can make. There is no replacement for Portra. Anyone can make a soulless digital camera.

I don't doubt that, but most consumers are not professional photographers. They want results that look professional.

A digital camera is a no-brainer combined with a printing station where the phone just docks. They already have a version of this, but if they control hardware they could make it really solid—no compatibility issues, no headaches, just exactly what you want: an easy way to capture high-quality memories that don't get lost in the void of your camera roll.

Phones already do a lot of processing of images to make them look better than what a digital camera would capture out of the box, and Kodak already makes such a dock, it's called the Kodak dock: https://www.kodak.com/en/consumer/product/printing-scanning/...

$200CAD. Ouch.

A little cheaper than an Epson EcoTank printer, for sure (about ⅔ the price), and likely much better prints. But it’s a single-purpose machine, not something that can print off _anything_ in colour on Letter/A4 sized paper.

> A digital camera is a no-brainer

A digital camera might be straightforward but the magic is in the lenses. You could make the most fabulous CMOS sensor known to man but if you put it behind a 3mm-thick, hugely aspheric plastic lens like a phone uses then you might as well not have bothered.

No chance. The number of patents involved means that only established cellphone manufacturers could ever dream of such a thing. If it involves a portable camera or screen that connects to the internet, it is totally locked down.

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.

I 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

I 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.

Yes. 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.

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