At Kodak, Clinging to a Future Beyond Film | Hacker News Reader

At Kodak, Clinging to a Future Beyond Film

nytimes.com

41 pointsgdilla31 comments

Kodak’s researchers invented digital photography and put the technology in professional cameras in the 1990s. There were plans to move to digital consumer cameras, but the cash Kodak made on traditional photography made it complacent.

Wow, talk about fumbling the future. I guess they didn't read Clayton Christensen.

Disrupt yourself, or someone else will save you the trouble.

They did market a line of digital consumer cameras, contrary to what the article says. The first was the QuickTake series, done in conjunction with...wait for it...Apple.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_QuickTake

Exactly... And it wasn't bad. I owned one. But they got eclipsed by camera phones and that was the end of that. Hindsight being 20/20, they probably should have focused on selling constituent parts of the camera to phone manufacturers (like Sony does with lenses for iPhone).

But, they did try:

http://www.steves-digicams.com/camera-reviews/kodak/

My understanding is, however, that they simply weren't all that noteworthy.

Also, bear in mind the degree of pivot required - it's not merely a shift in strategy, but a fundamental transformation, from developing films, into developing entire electronic devices, with all the entirely new skills required in industrial design, UI, and so forth.

It can, of course, be done - Fujifilm has managed to continue in the digital photography sector, although they were rather more broadly based to begin with. Similarly, Nikon and Canon were already acquainted with what was necessary in a DSLR, and were able to transition to the digital world with aplomb.

To provide some context, consider this rec.photo thread from 1990, on the future of photography:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/rec.photo/ZnqcQVzAln...

> Fujifilm has managed to continue in the digital photography sector, although they were rather more broadly based to begin with

Well, they really became broader based in large part when they saw film was going to decline and branched into areas where they could apply their film expertise outside of photography. See e.g. http://www.economist.com/blogs/schumpeter/2012/01/how-fujifi...

They do sell cameras today. (Nice ones; I own one.) But it's a relatively niche business.

(And even so they struggled. Film sales absolutely fell off a cliff.)

>> To provide some context, consider this rec.photo thread from 1990, on the future of photography:

> Right now, 1 Megabyte of memory costs about $45 retail. This will not drop by an order of magnitude in the next decade without a breakthrough, or an economical Gallium-Arsenide process to replace Silicon.

Hmm.

Fortunately the storage business has been ripe with technological breakthroughs since 1990, both for spinning rust and solid state memory. See e.g. the Nobel prize in physics in 2007. I still have my 8MB CF card that cost $40, I think that was around 2000, so for solid state the past 15 years have been insanely good.

That rec.photos thread is great. I love reading old predictions. For some reason many of them got hung up on the idea that there would be crazy compression schemes that eliminate all the creative parts of photos.

> O.K. Chemical films can presently store more information than any reasonable digital image-getter can. However, digital may be possible if one has a wristwatch-sized supercomputer doing various shades of image/abberation recognition capable of replacing the actual information with some sort of 'tokenized' equivalent of the original image. Fine. Such data compression/ reduction techniques may alow you to have your little computer-camera.

> But wat if you want those abberations, or if you want that blur for that action shot, or if you want that sun/iris flare for a neato scenic shot, or if you want to use some weird lighting effects? Then you are s.o.l. By having the camera identify/correct (tokenize) and remove all of the possible artifacts of using a real-world camera (which is the only way that such a camera is possible), you will also eliminate almost all of your creative power.

Sounds like some complaints about digital audio compression schemes.

Yap. Remember my first digital camera was a Kodak. It wasn't very good compared to others during that time.

As others have noted, they did try in a number of ways--including coming out with a (probably too early) product to allow consumers to view scanned photos on their TV. (Also healthcare, photocopiers, etc.) When the sales of your main product--which is a wonderful consumables business and basically owns the world market outside of Japan--drop 98 percent in about 10 years you've got a really tough problem however many business strategy books you read.

Digital cameras very quickly became a commodity. The underlying technology is very scalable and it is harder to distinguish oneself in this space.

I think a more apt analogy is film vs. CCD, rather than film camera vs. digital camera. Kodak was a films company, not necessarily a camera company. In that sense, Kodak is (was?) a manufacturing company, with strength in manufacturing films, etc.

Would Kodak have the same competitive advantages if it switched to manufacturing CCD arrays? Probably not... The nature of the sensors are so different.

In hindsight, they probably lost the game much before the advent of digicams. Some decision at some point in 1970s or 1980s, Kodak executives/management probably decided against diversifying.

Edit: Sure enough, found an article that talks about how Fujifilm continues to thrive: http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014240529702037504045771704...

Answer: Diversification. Quoting the article:

> What Fujifilm did was to look further than simply moving to digital photography from analog. Instead, the company tapped its chemical expertise for broader uses, such as drugs and liquid-crystal display panels. Cosmetics, as well: It seems the process for stopping photos from fading can be used on skin, too. > "The most decisive factor [for our success] was how drastically we were able to transform our businesses when digitalization occurred," Mr. Komori said. What set Fujifilm apart from Kodak, he said, was the Japanese company's effort to branch out by employing technologies originally developed for photography. > And one of Fujifilm's latest endeavors is cosmetics—it has its own Astalift skin-care line—that use antioxidation technology for preventing photos from fading. >The company also has spent ¥650 billion since 2000 to acquire health-care companies. Fujifilm acquired midsize drug maker Toyama Chemical Co. for $1.4 billion in 2008 and last month agreed to buy U.S. medical-equipment maker SonoSite Inc. for $995 million.

"Some decision at some point in 1970s or 1980s, Kodak executives/management probably decided against diversifying."

In that era Kodak was diversified in areas such as pharmaceuticals, medical diagnostics, thin-film coatings, and industrial chemicals. They've all been spun out or sold off, starting in the early 1990s.

I visited the Kodak works in Rochester during the company's heyday in the late 1960's. It was an amazing place, literally a city dedicated to making the things people used to take pictures. The words with which this excellent short film by the NYT opens could serve as a pointed warning of the dangers of thinking things will always be as they are.

  “I’m mining the history of this company for its 
  underlying technologies,” said Jeff Clarke, 53, who 
  became Kodak’s chief executive last year. Mr. Clarke has 
  no delusions that Kodak could bring those technologies to 
  market on its own;

Why are they so down on Kodak as a brand? There's still a ton of people who have very fond associations with the Kodak brand, since the film camera would only come out only at those special meaningful moments like birthdays, weddings, vacations, etc. (No, people didn't just routinely snap pictures of their lunch back then.)

Anyway, where can I get a Kodachrome Instagram filter?

My family took a ton of pictures on Kodak film when I was a kid so I certainly fall into the demographic of people who have fond memories of the brand. However, I would hesitate to buy a Kodak product now because I would assume that it was just a piece of junk with Kodak branding. Until just now I didn't even realize Kodak still did anything besides license patents.

Well, that is not true. I'm shooting film my whole life (my father was a photographer and we had several cameras at home). I use digital for about 95% of my pictures, but I have more analog than digital cameras, all of them are in perfect shape and I use them regularly. My favourite BW film is Kodak Tri-X [0], which is still being produced. I'm also using Kodak Ektar, Portra and still have few rolls of Kodak E100, although that one is not in production anymore.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodak_Tri-X

I think it's true. Kodak film is still respected today. Kodak cameras are not. What pictures have you taken with a Kodak?

I wasn't talking about Kodak film, I was talking about any arbitrary Kodak branded product. When companies die they often sell the brand, which then gets slapped on lots of random, usually low quality, products unassociated with the original company. This is why I would have been, until I found out that Kodak still exists as a real company, been extremely hesitant to buy something with "Kodak" on the box.

This reminds me of how awesome NY Times is... I remember watching The Iron Triangle audio slideshow and thinking how great it was: http://www.nytimes.com/packages/khtml/2004/02/28/nyregion/20...

https://www.google.com/search?q=audio+slideshow+site%3Anytim...

Amusingly, Kodak is being paid by some major studios to continue to make 35MM cine film. [1] They're doing it to keep their older directors happy. Fuji quit that business in 2013.

Film distribution is almost all digital already. Making, shipping, and handling film prints was always a pain, and that's over.

[1] http://www.wsj.com/articles/kodak-movie-film-at-deaths-door-...

I'd rather they just made a new Kodachrome line, but easier to process than the original... film is still pretty popular in the amateur crowd, and if they released a color film that was as easy to process as b&w and looked like Kodachrome, I'd be all over that.

Come on. That's a niche of a niche. Assuming it were even possible to develop such a thing, you wouldn't even pay back your R&D costs.

Then it wouldn't be Kodachrome. Kodachrome is fundamentally a different type of film from regular color negative and slide film, much less b&w film. It has no dye, rather the dye is added during processing.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-14_process

An easier-to-process color slide film exists... it's E-6. Some of the later Fuju slide films got very good using this process.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-6_process

E-6 is easy enough to do at home, and good enough that it is largely responsible for Kodachrome's decline. You're kidding yourself if you think there would be any market for something between the two.

Kodak had very good E-6 films latterly as well. I even mostly switched away from Kodachrome. (K-25 was always special but just too slow for most uses.)

E-6 is doable at home but you still need fairly exacting temperature control. I never had that kind of equipment. Certainly harder than B&W. But I agree with your basic point. Besides, slide processing is basically a by the numbers operation unless you're doing really funky stuff.

E-6 is easier than K-14 but it's still a lot pickier than B&W. I want a color film that's as easy to process as B&W in a Rodinal stand dev.

Color is inherently more complex than B&W, so I think you're asking for a unicorn. There's a 3-bath version of E-6 (with all the compromises that entails)... I'm not sure how much simpler color film development can get, short of Polaroid.

I was like, cling, cling, what's the pun, are they making some kind of celophane now, something about clingy....film...

> At Kodak, Clinging to a Future Beyond Film

Then I was like. WAIT a minute. This awkward title isn't drawing attention to "cling". It's just a painful nytimes headline word order. Seriously, this is just painful.

Why even use the word "cling"? Clinging would be if they stayed true to film. Leaving film for digital isn't clinging, it's adapting. Clinging is what they did in the 90s when digital started to rise and they ignored it.

You don't cling to the future. You cling to the past.

They're clinging to a relic of the past: a Kodak that thought it could adapt. They're clinging to the hope they had that they can adapt. They're not adapting.

I meant that the natural word order is "Kodak still clinging to a future beyond film."

Not, "at Kodak, clinging..." This doesn't even make any sense.

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