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The end for Kodak?

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To add to what I said about the 14n. I think it exemplifies what was wrong at Kodak. They invented digital photography, and were capable of making cameras with incredible color and resolution, but they always seemed to insert at least one fatal flaw in what they did to mess it up.

The 14n would have been perfect if it worked with long exposures and didn't have issues with lenses having to be set in the menu.

Leica's M9 uses a Kodak sensor and it too needs you to either set the lens in the menu, or have the lens coded with dots on the mount to tell the camera what lens settings to use. That's silly. Nikon and Canon don't require that. Of course, they can read from their AF lenses' chip what lens is used (but the 14n should have too but didn't!), but even with non-chipped lenses, like when people use adapters to put old manual lenses on new Canon digital cameras, there are no weird color effects.

The Canon stuff "Just works" and Kodak couldn't get that right. Now the company is going under because they couldn't make money on digital, and the losses are killing everything, including our beloved Kodak films, despite the films still being profitable today. I hope the films stay in production. I'll miss Tri-X.
 
chriscrawfordphoto said:
I had a 14n for several years. I bet all the guys saying it sucked never actually owned one. It DID have the best color that I have EVER seen from any digital camera. EVER. I preferred film for black and white, but while I had the 14n, I stopped shooting color film entirely.
Click to expand...

Thanks for that breakdown and samples.

It's my understanding that some of Kodak's patents are algorithms for colour rendering at the sensor level(and may include B&W math as well). It makes sense they would use what worked from their film profiles for their own products. Fuji does the same. Apparently in Japan it's a big deal to be able to render in favourite film options. Not so much elsewhere.
 
Aristophanes said:
Not all theatres with digital projectors have access to the bandwidth necessary for direct transmission of the master files. They receive their copies on encrypted disks via courier...
Click to expand...

Ahhh, yes. The old admonition takes on new life. In days gone by, back when a 9600 baud leased line was considered a "lot" of bandwidth the old saying went that one should never underestimate the bandwidth of a van full of 9-track tapes!
 
Yep. I can burn a 4GB file to DVD (at 4x - no need to burn at 16x) and drive it over to a friend's house across town in less time than it takes me to upload it to a server that they can download it from. Ahh yes, the amazing speed of the JIC (Jump In Car) protocol. It's the wide-area version of the "old time" sneakernet.

ME Super
 
While I agree that Kodak comprehensively stuffed up their digital play, I think it's a bit harsh to condemn them for not going on with digital SLRs. They made the 14n and thereby demonstrated that such an instrument could be manufactured by tacking extra bits onto existing film cameras and more importantly, showed that there was a market for the product. Having done that, Canon and Nikon were destined to write the next chapter for no better reason than they were SLR camera makers and Kodak was not (IDN for sure but has Kodak ever made SLRs other than the Retina Reflex, the Instamatic Reflex and the 14n ?).

Also, I don't think that even if Kodak could have made SLRs that challenged the Japanese brands it would not have made much difference to their position today because the real damage was done firstly by consumer level cameras, phone cameras and the associated loss of consumable sales - not SLRs. As others have said, a lost opportunity for Kodak was that it apparently failed to fully exploit its CCD sensor technology before it was superceded. OzJohn
 
Previous posts have it right. The software and firmware were real problems. Kodak was not / is not a software company. They got the color correction and color basics right but many other aspects were a mess. One version of SW erased the users config.sys and autoexec.bat upon installation! Great stuff. The support group went mad. At one time, all of them quit!

Just a new EK factoid. :sad:

PE
 
SilverGlow said:
You are wrong on so many, many levels.

1. The distribution of digital movies is NOT with harddrives. The movies are transmitted from the distribution location to the theatre's harddrive via the internet and/or satllelites. You are blinded by your religious bias toward film, and so much that you actually tell little fibs to bulster your argument. Your comments kill your integrity.

2. The "error rate" of digial files is nearly non-existent. The copy function uses check-sum logic to insure that the original and the copy match 100%.

Stick to topics you actually know something about.
Click to expand...

The company I worked for in Australia, when we did digital distribution, we used harddrives. And we weren't the only ones, a lot of the other companies the movie theatre's dealt with also supplied harddrives, as all of the theatres aren't able to download the files.

Granted, we are a smaller market than the US.

The second comment is true. The error rate is incredibly low for that exact reason. The errors we came across where introduced when digitizing the file the first time more so than afterwards.
 
As I understand, the problem of storing film isn't just temperature. Natural background radiation degrades film, too.
There is no place on earth where there isn't, at least, some radiation. All unexposed film will eventually fog beyond useability no matter how well it is stored.
 
I have shot Tri-X expired in 1985 and it was still good. Cold frozen from then, no problems except for the one opened packet in the box, which had the leading edge degraded.

Let's see, 2012 - 1985 = 27 years old. Yes, I have used film older than a lot of my coworkers.
 
Brian;

Your definition of good may not be Kodak's definition! You expect high quality from them and included in this is having one batch of film match another. So, it my be up in Dmin, down in contrast or slower in speed. It may be foggier or grainier! We don't know.

PE
 
Probably "grainier." But I started with LF in 1999, so it's not like I have a personal reference point for actual use of in-date 1985 Tri-X. It's good fodder for my pinhole camera, though! :wink:

I can only say that it is fine for what I do with my camera. However, I do have plenty of in-date TMax and Tri-X in 4x5 and 8x10! (And E100G in 8x10!)

Sometimes I wonder if the fogging issues are due to local background radiation instead of stellar radiation. Since I don't see fogging with "ancient" film in my local area, it's a working hypothesis for me. Of course, I'm not going to be carrying out any experiments!
 
Hah, Apple would give us one film to replace colour and B&W, "duotone". Google would give us film that secretly uploads a digital copy to them :smile:
 
44 pages and counting. Are you following all this Mr Lebens? It started with a kiss, I never thought it would come to this.:D

pentaxuser
 
dnjl said:
Something tells me that they won't acquire the film division though.
Click to expand...

It doesn't look like they're going to sell their film patents, nor does it look like they're going to sell off their film business.

On the contrary it looks like they're still trying to figure out ways to make film relevant for archival purposes.

Here's a lovely news item: Kodak Releases More Film Stock for Archiving and Preservation. Music to my ears! Here's the info page for the new film, Vision3.

Combined with that new film information iOS app, it looks like Kodak is making a concerted effort to fool us into believing it's film business will continue.
 
Well, it seems we finally know who's "running" Kodak in these times and who is behind products being discontinued...

Dead Link Removed

This article quotes insiders saying discontinuing Ektachrome 100D was a decision of financial controllers and NOT of Kodak itself(!). The same guys are telling Kodak to raise prices of Super8 negative films by 15% and DOUBLE the price of Tri-X in Super8. It really seems like they're killing off the slow(er) moving products and only keep those which sell quickly so they don't sit on a load of inventory which only sells off slowly... Draw your own conclusions - I'm just saying that IF Kodak were in a financiall ybetter situation we wouldn't have seen all of the products go we had to part with in the last months...
 
From time to time it has been mentioned that Kodak has as its burden an old power plant to drive the industrial area. Well, it seems that Kodak has been able to transform that burden to money and at the same time keep the wheels turning: http://www.rbj.net/article.asp?aID=193484
 
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