On 10/02/2014 14:04, Bowser wrote:
On Mon, 10 Feb 2014 00:28:28 -0500, Dale
wrote:

having worked there

consumer film was where the big money was

Which was surprising as anyone who tried Fuji film never went back!

too often consumer systems were developed and then a professional system
was hacked out of it

Kodak astronomical emulsions and plates were specialist products but
largely out evolved by digital imaging and ever more sensitive CCDs.

as opposed to developing professional systems and watering them down for
consumer applications

would have taken some quick work too keep up with the consumer demand,
but Kodak was big enough to keep up with that I think

then there is the general USA/UN/WTO issue of fair trade versus free
trade allowing cheap imports from places with less consideration of
workers and environmentalism, etc.

but Kodak had plants in Mexico after NAFTA, so they should have been
able to invest that consumer film money better I think

There was a story going around about the Kodak CEO making a statement
about the digital threat: "how can we stop this digital thing?"

Or something like that. If true, well...

Kodak's management screwed the pooch. Some of the earliest digital
SLRs were Kodak conversions. Kodak sold the first full frame DSLR!

They had too many MBAs.

Granted, it wasn't great, but they had the tech and just let it die.
No excuses, this is a business school case study now.

The core patent for consumer single shot colour was by Kodak employee
Bryce Bayer and still bears his name. Obituary shows how far advanced
Kodak was along the digital imaging line. My first very early digital
camera was a Kodak DC-120 which was useful for scientific work as you
could access the raw Bayer array. Note the date of the patent 1976!!!
(They had a phenomenal technical lead at one point)

http://www.imaging-resource.com/news...meras-has-died

Even then they demonstrated a tremendous facility for shooting their
foot by releasing a similarly named DC-210 shortly afterwards.

My dealer was convinced he'd be stuck with the earlier and in some ways
better DC-120 so I got it at a knock down price. It was quite a cool
looking thing rather like a StarTrek tricorder and hammered its
batteries drawing nearly 2A out of a set of 4x AAs worst case.

But it was a damn good camera and served me well as backup and to do
various web photos even with its ~1Mpixel limitations.

A bit like the later Kodak launch confusing professional grade PhotoCD
scanning .PCD with the newer poxy consumer grade PictureCD with the same
acronym. You only got caught out once and went and bought your own
scanner. Shame as PhotoCD was a very good service until they ruined it,
but you could not afford to take the chance of getting a disk with toy
low quality consumer grade scans half the time.

--
Regards,
Martin Brown