Kodak's Digital Disaster

My very first digital camera was (and still is) a Kodak DX4530. It was a hand-me-down, LOL, back when I was accepting hand-me-downs. :) Whopping 5Mpx!

It actually produces great images, within its limitations, of course. I still occasionally use it as a carry-everywhere camera. It uses regular SD cards, but is limited to 4Gb, IIAC. The largest I have for it is 2Gb.

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I like Kodak's work: the Leica M9. With a replaced sensor cover glass it has great color and definition.
 
It’s sort of amazing that THE photo capturing powerhouse that Kodak was didn’t realize they needed to position themselves to dominate the digital sensor tech market. They had all the resources and even developed the technology. What a case study in disastrous management. Rochester is a shell after the fall of Big Yellow. Really a sad thing
 
Ccoppola82 said:
It’s sort of amazing that THE photo capturing powerhouse that Kodak was didn’t realize they needed to position themselves to dominate the digital sensor tech market. They had all the resources and even developed the technology. What a case study in disastrous management. Rochester is a shell after the fall of Big Yellow. Really a sad thing
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Rochester lost a lot of businesses. Xerox HQ headed to the NY area, is Graflex still around? Xerox had been Haloid Paper, manufacturer of museum grade photo paper but found a way out, Kodak and the others did not. And not just Rochester saw its fortunes change in the last 50 years. Leica developed the format, the Japanese developed the market.
 
the link is now gone.
Anyway, I did an MBA and we studied a lot of sour cases from many angles.
Where did it go wrong? Hybris. Mostly. Myopia as a result. Or. Narcissism. Blindness as a result.

Through many years I started to recognize other elements. Such as going for the good solution what ever it takes. But the organisational process is not guarded. There is no organizational memory.
Then it becomes so complex to re-enact the route to develop changes. Example: Kodak had a very very good online printing service here in Europe. Upload. Pay. deliver. You know the drill. Then came new payment services. Credit cards needed verification codes. They were not able to adapt the website. They had hired the developing team probably. I guess the likes of Accenture or mine. Then afterwards your're a dead duck. No movement possible, nothing handed over, slowly you cook.​

Of course I mock circumstances. Like I to blame German organisational disaster on their beer (it is quite good actually), the Italian or French on their wine (ditto).

There is nothing to stop Leica buying the know-how of the CCD, even when it does not allow live-view, it can still be a great solution, for production & development elsewhere. But it is more than the CCD, it is also the fine algorithms they once developed to 'depict', to make the picture. By just thinking it is hardware, one will loose out. To the Cinese Cheapo. It is the total. Again, I expect no remaining organisational memory - that the box was much much bigger, and that it took a lot of companies to make the success first time.

About algo's: I have the Lumix S5. The native RAW processing already has a great amount of sharpening. Like Capture One, it will jump layers, that is millimeters, to detect patters it will show sharp. Horrible. In a face, an eyelash can be sharp (the plane of focus if they understand) and some hair a centimeter or more along the side, just one patch. Or: beard stumps, fading away softly, then all at once there is a blob of sharpened artifacts. Leica would never (???) do that.

So there is a low of work in the whole.
 
Walt Fallon was the last CEO of Kodak who was an engineer by training and at heart. Once the financial folks took the helm then the company went to crap. Bottom line, Bottom Line, BOTTOM LINE was the marching orders. Walt was a great guy who grew Kodak in many ways, including the bottom line.

Kodak had a monopoly on photography at one time according to the US Government.

They were the ultimate company who owned/managed their supply chain.

Moving quickly was never specialty of Kodak, but different divisions did when they needed to.

Their plant were some of the few back then that you could live next to safely. They kept unions out by caring about their employees.

Capitalism is like Democracy, it sucks, but they are the best things we have.

B2 (;->
 
I am sure hubris had something to do with Kodak's demise. I had family in Rochester and Kodak was the hometown hero. A Kodak job was a good deal and part of the fabric of the town. But Kodak dropped the ball. They could have done what Haloid/Xerox did and lock up digital with patents but they ran from the fray. That loss changed Rochester forever, and photography. That M9 sensor was really a good one. And the code to make the sensor data a good image was good, too. But it has taken until the M11 for Leica to get back to where the M9 was. With Leica it may be hubris/Übermenschichkeit. They sure lost their way.

I am a Pixii fan and am interested in seeing how this camera affects the RF market (Leica).
 
jsrockit said:
Please explain...
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I find the M9 CCD sensor images very pleasing. It seems that the M11 has excellent images, also. The M240 images were good but not as good as the M9. Likewise the M10. This is my opinion. It is also my opinion that it is unfortunate that Leitz has been so unmotivated as to maintain or improve image quality. After all, image is what it is all about. But is Leica selling a camera's image or an image's camera?
 
The image coming off the CCD in the M9 and M8 goes through very little processing. The M Monochrom- just about no processing. Noise removal consists of measuring a hot pixel during a long exposure.

My oldest Kodak Digital is a DCS200ir. 30 years old now.
 
I thought we were talking about Kodak, not Leica.... Anyway, a line from the book "The Leopard" by Giuseppe di Lampedusa is something Kodak should have heeded: "If you want things to stay the same, you have to change."
 
What Kodak should have done is become THE builder of sensors of all types and sizes. When you look at Brownies, Ponys, Retinas and alike you can see they understood how to build a series of offerings, too bad they couldn't do that for sensors.


B2 (;->
 
Something else Kodak miscalculated spectacularly: As the rest of the world was converting to digital, Kodak figured that China's rising middle class would buy film rather than go straight to digital themselves. Guess what happened.
 
KoNickon said:
I thought we were talking about Kodak, not Leica.... Anyway, a line from the book "The Leopard" by Giuseppe di Lampedusa is something Kodak should have heeded: "If you want things to stay the same, you have to change."
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Good point, pardon my drift there. However it was an intersection of Kodak and Leica and is an example of two camera greats dropping the ball. "I am not making this up." Sometimes I think that the Japanese ate Kodak's and Leica's lunch because those two greats gave their lunch to them.

Then again, hindsight is always 20-20.
 
The M9 and M Monochrom are the last of the line using Kodak CCD's.

It was nice to be able to call up Kodak and talk with the engineers that designed the CCD's and worked on these cameras. When the DCS200 came out, I talked them into an IR version of it. When the M9 came out, called them up and asked for a Monochrome version of it. The engineer laughed and we talked about the 760m, and that they had tried to talk Leica into a monochrome version of the M8. They told me they would bring it up again.
 
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