@@itsMe_TheHerpes It just depends on the topic. When it came to following good medical advice when you have cancer, yeah not so smart. But, marketing and leading development on consumer electronic devices, very smart.
@@overbeb he was not smart, he was malefic. he changed the game in electronic devices allright... he changed it form an industry that was meant to serve the consumer, into an industry that enslaves the consumer and demeans the consumer. there is no respect what so ever for the customer, and all companies are the same now.
@@overbeb and again i am mad about that idiotic hell's minion called steve jobs. ugh. you can't get anything good these days because him and the likes of him. world wide social engineering is a frustrating and scary thing.
@@sonicboy678 that market being...? Considering an iPod is the same as an iPhone but without mobile connectivity and cheaper, you can get a still cheaper Android phone which has the option.
@@xerzy But there's no point in getting a phone if you don't plan to use it as such, especially since it would hardly be effective as one without a carrier. Also, I really don't see how that reasoning can hold up in the face of tablets, considering that the vast majority of those run on the same operating systems as phones, but with far more bulk (hell, some are limited to Wi-Fi, just like the iPod Touch). If Samsung still made the Galaxy Player (or another company proved willing to compete in that market) I wouldn't be bringing this up. I'd recommend waiting for Apple to discontinue the iPod Touch before claiming/implying that there's no market for it.
Apple literally quit reporting Ipod sales they are so bad, way back in 2015. Sales when from an average of 10 million a quarter to 3 a quarter before they quit reporting them. Your argument makes no sense... tablets exist because people want a larger screen to watch video/work on vs a phone, not because they want a 10 inch music player lol. The fact that tablets and phones all do the exact same thing an ipod does is why they are going the way of the dodo. Android/Samsung didn't decide to stop selling music only players because they just wanted to loose money... they got out of a market that was disappearing and left Apple to provide for what little market was left.
This is a very lightweight analysis of the situation with Eastman Kodak. Fujifilm in Tokyo faced the same situation but pivoted successfully. The problem wasn't that Kodak didn't see the potential in digital cameras; the problem was there wasn't - and still isn't - high margins in the part of consumer market Kodak had access to. Film and paper have enormous high margins, and shareholders were demanding a return on this investment. At its core, Kodak was a chemicals company with world-class expertise in coating materials at high speed, in total darkness, with near-perfect quality. They ran out of things to coat. Meanwhile, Fujifilm has pivoted to pharmaceuticals and cosmetics, while keeping its photography business alive and well. Printing pictures is still a multi-billion-dollar business, too.
Yeah, he's fallen prey to the common pop-culture understanding of why Kodak failed, a myth that sounds "truthy" and is easy to repeat, but doesn't actually bear up under analysis.
While you are undoubtedly right on a number of points, I think the line “they ran out of things to coat” is a little too easy, and again runs into the problem of a snappy line that sounds like the truth but is quite a bit removed from it. The very special kind of coating that Kodak had the most and almost monopolistic expertise in was coating of emulsion on celluloid. But they also had a truckload of expertise in doing CCD sensors and decades of patents. They invented the Bayer filter FFS! It was a number of things that took them down. For instance the trial with Polaroid and its consequences. The blatantly unfair monopoly verdict. The APS and Disc camera flops. And the difficulty in leveraging their sensor and associated algorithms.
@@Frisenette Well, I was keeping things simple, for the sake of the UA-cam audience. I agree with you on their expertise. For one thing, they co-developed the OLED screen, and even tried to become an OEM supplier of screens. Kodak even put an OLED screen on a digital camera, long before one appeared on a smartphone. My objection to this video is that Kodak did not stop innovating at all. Today, if Kodak were a startup, they'd be lauded for the failures and be given billions in VC money.
@@Frisenette To be fair APS was not really a flop, but a victim of timing. It did have a decent run given the era. (1996-2011) It was also not just a Kodak,product It was supported by all of the major consumer film companies. Disc WAS a flop as its negatives were about half the size of the 110 cartridge format leading to fairly bad enlargements.
A Kodak rep spoke at my film school in '97. I asked what he thought about HD and digital. He chuckled and said, " we're not worried about it. They will never match film."
Some directors still use film for their movies... but there is one advantage to digital: lighting. You can shoot a night scene with a good digital camera almost by moonlight alone. Try that with film and it will be darker than battle with the Night King on game of thrones!
johnm2012 I’ve kept them all; any non- keepers can always be retaken and the time, another great thing with digital. As a rough estimate, I would have spent something like £1200 if I had used film - more than I spent on the flights there and back.
The funny thing, is Kodak hired a consulting firm to analyze their business model and they told them film was dying, but they continued to hold on to the belief that they were too big, to fail.
@@anandhua.b4589 And same as the Oil Companies believe themselves to be. Seriously. Those folks make their livings, built their whole smoking Empire, off of Dead Dinosaurs™. And still can't see what happens when you refuse to evolve. As a non-businessman, I so see the absolute brilliance of taking a non-renewable commodity, and selling it to go Up In Smoke, with NO BACKUP PLAN. At least the Tobacco Pushers can grow more tobacco... I don't see any way to grow more Dead Dinosaurs, so that junkies can keep getting their fixes of it.
Jameel Ja, would you be willing to lay off 1000s and effect another 1000 families from decreased income (a lot of small to medium business, Kodak was their #1 customer), for some fuzzy image that would need at least a decade of tech innovations to be come profitable ?
@@tomservo5007 no, for sure not, but they could have continued to improve the technology and when the time was perfect create a digital camera and phase out film. Insuring a seamless transition for their employees.
George Eastman is the anonymous (for a long time) benefactor that gave the Masschusetts institute of technology enough money to move form its crowded and tiny Boston campus to a way, way larger campus in Cambridge. There was enough money to build a huge and monumental neoclassical main building but most importantly, the money allowed MIT to not have to be bought out by Harvard to become Harvard's school of engineering. Eastman did something else that was amazing. His enormous mansion had a central "Trophy Room" and he wanted to make it almost twice as large while keeping the rest of the house the same. Everbody said that was impossible but he finally found one contractor that said that he would raise the house off of its foundation, split in the middle, move the two sides apart and fill in the middle again. He did it!
To be completely fair to Kodak, the first error was stupid, but the second was an easy one to make once upon a time. What people did with photos was look at physical copies of them. Digital photos were awkward to store, didn't have the resolution they have now, and weren't easy to leaf through on most computers from 15 years ago. Why *wouldn't* you want a physical copy? Then social media happened.
Not just social media, but the fact that in a matter of a few years, nearly everyone had access to a device that, for the same price as a digital camera, could take photos, store them, display them, and effortlessly share them wirelessly to anyone else in the world within seconds of capturing the image. Who would buy a consumer digital camera + inkjet printer (Kodak's bread and butter) after that?
your talking crap man, 20 years ago i was using my computer for viewing photos and keeping them and back in 1996-1997ish i was burning images and video to my CD burner using windows95 oO
Agree totally! This video fast-forwards through 2001 to 2011 (i.e from Kodak easy-share to instagram). There is a metric TON of of the exact issues you mention that simply changed the entire medium. And it is also disingenuous to mobile device technology, without which there would be no instagram or photography as, sadly, >90% of consumers know it today.
@@Yahgiggle That part is true, But 20 years ago no one had an easy way share photos quickly. send a bunch of photos to someone on dial-up at 56k (assuming actuality could connect at 56k...)? good luck! Showing digital photos meant either printing them or handing out CDs. What changed the necessity to print was portable high resolution devices like smartphones, tablets. (snapshots are no longer in my wallet because of it.) Sharing online became only practical with the ubiquity of high speed internet. Plus 20 years ago consumer grade digital cameras where about as good as a still from a VHS tape,meaning for most people the only way to get a decent digital image was to shoot on fim and scan. It was a reasonable bet then to expect people to want to print.
As a photographer who shoots 90% film. Kodak is still very much alive. Film prices are only maybe $2-3 higher than they were 20 years ago (depending where you shop). And Kodak released two new film stocks in 2018. Something that no other major film company has done in years.
I shoot some film from time to time and can agree, film is Still cheap (not using your phone camera cheap but Still cheap enough) even from Kodak, it's just that the Kodak today really isn't the same Kodak as in the past, their size is drastically reduced
Kodak had a lot of problems not talked about here. They were so profitable for so long that everything they did was top heavy with cost and over-engineered. Fujifilm was cutting into their film sales because they were making their products in lights-out factories that were essentially identical, i.e. lower cost, more efficient. Kodak responded to this competition by trashing Fujifilm, saying their color was inferior. All the while consumers were buying more Fujifilm. You could write a big book on this very interesting subject. I saw it firsthand as a software vendor to Kodak in the late 1990s when they were unraveling.
yea it kinda is actually. sounds like he had a long life (77 yrs old), was satisfied and felt accomplished, and thought his death through and was sure before doing it.,so why is it described as "tragic"?
@@thechief00 sounds more like a man who fails at the transition from work to retirement because he never learnt to enjoy anything and gets depressed imho but this kind of shit is not uncommon among CEOs so no surprise there
I did a college level year long film course. At the last week or two, 2 Kodak employees came in, talked about film stock and how "it's long from dead" and showed a half hour DVD they produced with Hollywood heavyweights focusing on the pros on film, and cons of digital. Kodak announced bankruptcy not even two weeks later.
Ironic that the two Kodak reps made a presentation with a DVD. It would have made an impression on me (if I was part of your film class) if they wheeled in a film projector and showed their production made with their very own Kodak film.
A million years ago, when I worked in photography shops, the Kodak rep would swagger in like he owned the place, and, actually, he did. He'd bring with him the goodies and news of more to come. "Big Yellow" was no idle boast.
Those same reps would go back to Kodak marketing and tell them what their customers wanted and the marketing geniuses would reply "We know what customers want better than they do". Small markets didn't interest them, but it did interest Fuji!!
kodak tried. they tried hard to shift to digital. they could not do it. their was literally nothing they could do about it. the "profit margin" on film was so insanely incredibly obnoxiously huge that "NO" replacement technology no matter how good could replace that. and they knew it. they understood they were dead and there was nothing they could do about it. the "size and scope" of kodak was supported by the insane profit margins on film which "could never ever be sustained" in a digital world. and they knew it. its like if you made hotdogs that people bought every single week a huge number of people and you sold them for $7 a pop and it costs you a nickle to make each one. then someone comes along and says hey you can do it all for nearly $0.00 per shot. there is just nothing they could do to replace that $6.95 per profit margin that their entire company was based around. nothing. kodak of all companies knew exactly what was coming and they also knew. they understood. that their was literally nothing they could do about it. absolutely nothing. which kind of sucks. but that is the nature of digital I guess. there was no "adapt" their was no "compete" sure they could dominate the digital photo market. even if they dominated 10 to 1 against everyone else they would still go bankrupt because their entire company was literally sat upon the shoulders of the insane profit margin of film and NO amount of digital market share even 100% could replace that profit margin. ever.
That is an interesting view. If true, it seems like the company leaders could have at least put some defensive measures in place to prevent bankruptcy. Like pay off all or most of debt and be prepared to downsize in stages if needed. I know that's easy to say now with 20/20 hindsight but still...I remember thinking even in the early 2000's that it was just a matter of time before going to the store to develop film disappeared forever.
way to much overhead is my head. ie they were just too large. I doubt it would work if they downscaled to 20% of original size (I have no data purely a guess out my butt) they were just SO freaking huge because the profit margins were just so huge. @@AaronSmith1
Very true. Thank you for saying this because alot of people don't seem to understand this. Even if Kodak was the king of digital photography there's still no way they could have survived going from the massive profit margins of film to the slim pickings of digital. And on top of that, dedicated digital cameras completely died off as soon as camera phones caught on. The exception being in professional and hobbyist photography, but they've never had much of a presence in that scene anyways, even in the days of film. They've always been about the mass consumer market.
They could have diversified. They put all the eggs in one basket i.e. relying on films and films alone. They were using the profits from films to "innovate" on film cameras. If they did embrace the digital camera, they could focus their research on that, and move on to be the first company with a digital camera. With digital cameras on the market, they can then downsize their film productions which can cut costs, and fund more research. Sure, they won't be making that huge amount of profits anymore, but they can keep the company going for longer, until the next big opportunity for innovation arrives, which in current time, the mobile phone cameras for the general public, or high end cameras for photographers. They were either shortsighted, or the executives just wanted profits to go on for more bonus, since it is none of their problem if the company filed for bankruptcy in the near future. They still get paid nonetheless.
@Joe Black I think you are right and make a great case... but look at it this way.. Kodak had the money to invest in finding the next big thing... they were too focused on sustaining their own position rather than discovering a new position. It would be like an investor only investing in one type of business rather than diversifying their portfolio. Kodak could have and should have been Windows or Facebook if they had the vision...
I am old enough to remember when digital cameras weren't really a thing yet. The quality and clarity of phone cameras today still amazes me. I can take up zoomed photos of insects at night and get high detail. You almost never even use a flash anymore. Man technology is so cool.
Film, and printing paper, and developing chemicals, and film processing services. Eastman Kodak was essentially a chemical company, that sold cameras to ensure future sales of it's photographic chemicals and film products.
@@bobweiss8682 it's kinda asking a lot for a chemical company full of chemical/electrical engineers to pivot into becoming a software/hardware company overnight.
Nokia failed because thinked people still want analogic keyboard. BlackBerry failed because thinked people don't need apps. And so on, embrace the evolution or go extinct.
Not even a comprehendible sentence and still 171 likes? Well fluffy bunnies murder bicycles envelope sewage townsfolk. There...that should be good for 300 likes.
Got my first camera in 1958. My collection includes most of the classics shown. My last intentional use of film was 2001. It was said in the 70's that photography would become a truer art form when the materials were as cheap as pencil and paper... That time came... R.I.P. Kodak....
This understates (...well, doesn't state at ALL actually...) one of Kodak's most dominant sectors for decades, medical imaging. Kodak's revenue stemmed from far more than selling 35mm film to consumers. X-ray film (just one sheet of which was about 6x the surface area of an entire roll of Kodachrome) and, later, laser printing equipment (once radiology moved to digital CR/DX), were enormous profit centers.
The one innovation you missed out was Polaroid instant photos. I say this because Kodak launched its own version of a "Polaroid" Camera in breach of Polaroid patents. Law suit lost Kodak not only had to pay a massive payment to Polaroid for blatant breach of patents but where ordered, by the court, to buy back every Kodak Camera based on Polaroid technology. They were further ordered to replace each Kodak camera with a Polaroid. It cost Kodak $ Billions. BUT I thought that your video was very good at showing Kodak with their Head in the Sand. Thank you, sorry I hadn't picked this up earlier.
Kodak had rooms full of documentation showing the differences between Kodak and Polaroid film systems. The judge hearing the suit wouldn't allow Kodak to present ANY of that documentation. Oh, gee, did it matter that the judge didn't recuse herself for owning Polaroid stock?!!! At one point in time, Kodak made peel- apart instant film for Polaroid.
Kodak as we knew it back in the days of film cameras was doomed regardless of what they did. Their real moneymakers were always film, which was killed by digital photography, and making hard copies of photos, which was killed by the internet. If they had embraced digital photography from early on the only thing it would have achieved is sped up the death of the film business, one of the two things that really made money for them. In other words; They didn't do anything stupid, their business model was just killed by the unyielding march of technology.
Unfortunately for the public, when innovation happen in monopolistic companies the launch is delayed or cancelled. This has happened many times, some of which we haven't heard off as they are kept secret. Our capitalistic system has its flaws.
my mom worked for kodak for over 30 years, started in the 70s and thought she was going to retire with that job- but with digital cameras getting so popular in the 00s, their plants started closing and finally, theirs was closed too. i know there were other factors that went into the demise, but it's sort of crazy to think that the digital camera was being developed just as my mom started to work there, kind of like her fate was sealed before she even got started
She did well and hung on longer than most. Kodak provided good jobs for a lot of people and took care of your family and fed you. You owe a debt to Kodak for raising you. Respect to Kodak the true father of photography. 👏
Grew up in Rochester just a few blocks from the old Eastman house and with the Kodak plant within bicycling distance. Cool to see local history put into a video documentary like this.
This is where we are with environnemental issues. We could embrace change, create jobs and become technological leaders in wind and solar energy, smart grids, clean transportation, and have cleaner, healthier air, but we insist on defending fossil fuels in fear of change. Kodak had a 15 years head start, and the resources to make the most out of the change ahead of them. We are in the same position today.
Not even remotely the same. Explain to me exactly WHO the customers are for all of this wonderful, expensive, unproven, and unworkable technology? Which consumers want a less reliable, more expensive electrical network with higher maintenance costs, large amounts of time when power is unavailable, common brown outs, and other huge pains in the ass? Where are the customers who want to pay 2-3x the times for this "clean transportation" you speak of? If it's so popular why aren't busses, trains, and subways literally packed to the gills with customers, instead of needing federal, state, and local subsidy just to exist? Digital cameras came to be popular and take over virtually the entire camera market when they became VIABLE. Digital cameras are popular now because they are cheap, reliable, and improve on the product they replaced. They make as good of/better a picture as the common Kodak cameras of yesteryear, cost about the same, and offer the advantage of at home printing/see your picture before printing, plus they can take virtually unlimited photos with one cheap SD card. What you, and others, would have us do is try to artificially accelerate the development of all this "wonder technology" by forcing a unprepared product on a unwilling population. Nobody was tripping over themselves to buy that first digital camera, which would have cost thousands upon thousands of dollars to create a picture only as good as a 50 dollar camera, while being impossible to carry around and insanely slow (records on a digital tape). This is "green" energy/transportation right now. This is the scam behind climate change... people getting rich because a very expensive, unwanted product is being forced down the public's throat. The reality is, all of this technology was coming anyway. We have literally spent TRILLIONS attempting to force the equivalent of a 1970s digital camera on the public, when the 2000's digital camera was coming anyway. Nothing stops technological advancement, nothing can stop science from proceeding. The real question is... are you really willing to entirely destroy the middle class and impoverish two generations of Americans so that we can arrive at a "green" economy 1-2 decades early? Think I am exaggerating? Look at the Paris Climate Accord you no doubt cried over when the US pulled out. Estimates from pro environmental groups (let alone honest ones) calculated that to meet the accord's goals in the US, the average American's electrical bill would need to increase by a factor of ten between 2020 and 2030. This means that if you currently have a 100 dollar a month bill you would be looking at a 1000 dollar a month bill by 2030. Personally I would have been looking at a bill in 2030 of around 1,750-2000 dollars a month just for electricity. That's nearly double my mortgage payment!
@@testy462 You are obviously a climate change denier so no amount of argumentation from me can change your mind about that. But my point was that this story is a good analogy to our current situation: it's about embracing change. Sure, they couldn't have launched a digital camera in the 70s, but they had no excuse to be late in the game and let competitors win the battle. And what I think you missed is that change is not always a choice. Kodak couldn't do anything against the arrival of digital cameras, but they could at least be prepared. Climate change and other environnemental issues are a thing and if we don't act, we are going to face even bigger issues. Health issues linked to pollution are real, communities are getting progressively destroyed by rising water levels, droughts, disappearance of natural resources vital to local economies... It's estimated hundreds of millions of people will have to migrate due to climate change. Now, you're right, those technologies are not ready, and are, for now, expensive. But it's up to us to work on those issues and make them cheaper and better. We can create local jobs that can't be relocated in other countries. China is far from being a green country, but they are investing a LOT in solar, batteries and other critical technologies because they know there's a lot of money in those. It's up to us to compete.
That's interesting. I was thinking the same things while watching the video. I don't have a solar panel or EV yet but it is a future we are moving into. As a photography enthusiast, I thought Canon and Nikon will have a similar fate ignoring/delaying mirrorless cameras. It was quite late though. A year or two ago, I am expecting them to enter the smartphone industry as their expertise can be of value. However, it feels quite late again now that Huawei and others are releasing ridiculously featured camera systems with at least two cameras per phone.
I worked there as an intern (BSEE) in summers of 1987 and 1988. First summer: on mega-printing machine for the big “mail order” labs. Project was millions over budget but any-price-was-worth-it, because it would keep Kodak set as THE supplier of printing paper and chemicals for the labs. Second summer: “Imaging Electronics Center, East” doing research on truly-digital imaging (CCD sensors, modern electronics, digital compensation for imperfect lensing, printing dithering techniques). While was back at college for the last year in my bachelor’s degree, CEO Coby Chandler said, ‘we are a CHEMICAL company, not an imaging company’, and shut down the center. I went into a different industry, but watched the city of Rochester deteriorate alongside Kodak through the eyes of family members that stayed with Kodak till nearly the bitter end. Thank you for this well-assembled review of the rise and fall of this once-great man and enterprise!
4:30 but they missed setting up online storage (Google Drive, etc) and - even worse for a print company - printed personalised gifts like cards, mugs, t-shirts, photobooks.
I heard that Kodak missed another boat as well. The inventor of the photocopy system offered the patent for sale to Kodak but they rejected it because the resolution was too low for commercial application! Haliod Photographic went into partnership with the inventor and formed Xerox. Big mistake.
Just like when Tower Records laughed at MP3’s and iTunes! BTW, way before Steve’s and other digital cameras, the Polaroid instant SX70 camera got them real nervous as well.
You didn't include anything positive though! Kodak Alaris, the subsidiary of Kodak now responsible for producing photo film is still in business and seeing increased sales as more and more people beginning getting back into analog photography. The analog renaissance has been slow and steady, with major boosts from stars like Kendall Jenner and Lorde. Additionally, many filmmakers got together to force producers to bankroll a portion of production costs for Kodak's motion picture film. Filmmakers like Christopher Nolan have even gone so far as to say they'll quit filmmaking altogether if they can't shoot their films on authentic film. Long live Kodak!
Christopher Nolan and others Tarantino have a budget of millions for their movies, they can afford to shoot in 70mm, most of filmmakers and video producers can't afford to shoot in such format.
@@KathyXie Not really the point I was trying to make but since you wanna bring it there, alright. Shooting on film can actually be affordable depending on your budget and timeframe. Also, shooting film doesn't necessarily mean shooting 70mm. 16mm is far more affordable and available for smaller scale productions. Just this past summer I shot eight rolls of black and white 16mm and processed them by hand for an experimental film. Grant Singer used 16mm Kodak film stocks for the "Green Light" and "My My My" videos. And even if that wasn't happening, that doesn't change the fact that major filmmakers with deep pockets ARE still coughing up big bucks to shoot on 35mm and even 70mm. So there's still money to be made, and thus still a living, breathing market. And with the rising interest in analog photography amongst young people, it's likely we'll see Kodak continue to survive for at least a little while. Even in small batches, there is demand for film, a growing demand, in fact. But in directly answer to your question, shooting on film can be affordable. It's certainly not the most affordable option, but it's cheaper than long term renting an Arri or a Red. And the distinguishing aesthetic factor is a worthy value.
John Kenneth Huszagh LOL And some people love vinyl records as well. None of this detract from the fact that if they had kept with the times the phrase "Is a Kodak moment" would not have been relegated to history.
@@RoyCyberPunk Also not my point.... My point is simply that they still provide a product for a market which still has demand. And even better, growing demand, meaning that Kodak, which has scaled down its operations, will continue to operate to meet these demands through both producing motion picture film and photo film, as well as other products and services.
John Kenneth Huszagh Is still a niche market just like vinil records and plain vanilla wristwatches. The video is 100% accurate in the fact that Kodak lost its position on the industry because of their lack of vision which sucks to tell you the truth. We are entering a stagnation period when it comes to this type of products. Apple has virtually stopped innovating since Jobs died cellphones look the exact same they did 10 years ago. And the Bluetooth wristwatches leave so much to be desired is not even funny. I hope that Kodak gets it's chuzpah back but as long as they just catter to a niche market and not innovate that's not happening same with watchmakers like Seiko, Bullova I would love for them to design the ultimate Bluetooth wristwatches and start the age of wristwatches again.
My Dad worked for Kodak -- when he and others suggested video tape many years before it was commercial, he and the others were threatened in a personal letter from the CEO himself. -- "We are a sensitized film company -- not an electronics company" . Kodak had a succession of incompetent CEO's that eventually killed the company.
You didn't mention when Kodak went into instant photography market and stole Polaroid system, for which in 1990 had to paid Polaroid $925 millions after a 15 years lawsuit.
Same attitude held sway in the Xerox boardroom when their PARC facilities were told their computer innovations were never going to replace paper and GUI, the mouse and the intranet were allowed to be given to Jobs and his engineers at Apple.
You do not give Kodak enough credit. The Kodak DCS system was the first commercially available DSLR and was ahead of its time. The system was geared toward photojournalism and was not "middle of the pack". The digital camera market in 1991 was not "getting crowded." (Were you even born then?) Kodak did establish themselves early. Unfortunately, they didn't capitalize on their early lead.
Kodak's early professional digital cameras were built with Nikon bodies. Why? Because Kodak hadn't been the choice of pro photographers for a long time. Nikon and Canon were. Had Kodak kept up with their Retina SLR product line they would've been able to make their early pro digital SLRs on Kodak bodies, they could've had Kodak film SLRs sharing the pro market with Nikon and Canon. Kodak had been marketing to the consumer market, even making a 126 SLR that used Retina lenses, though the body didn't support all the features of some of the lenses. Then there were the times Kodak made instant cameras and somehow Polaroid was able to successfully sue to stop them, even after the patents on instant photography had expired.
@@droopy_eyes You are confusing cell phones and cameras. Digital cameras basically appeared around 1999 as a significant force (13% of the market). By 2000 they were in the 2-3 megapixel range. In 2003 they outsold film cameras (73% share). Camera phones really appeared around 2004, first at very low resolution but by 2005-06 they were at two megapixels. 2006-09 smart phones and digital cameras matched in sales in Finland, then smart phones really took off increasing sales 4 fold in 4 years. Camera sales dropped by about half and continued to decline.
For those of us old enough to be around then - and actually experience it, I disagree with this highly inaccurate millenial lense. The market was FAR from crowded in 1991 - unless you wanted to own a digital camera instead of a car. The DCS was the standard by the mid 90's - An actual portable DSLR that you could print from... how novel. I remember watching how Kodak died a death of a thousand cuts, it wasn't a SINGULAR THING that killed the company. Kodak drowned on all its fronts due to mismanagement. So apparent in the 2000s if you dealt with them. Left hand didn't know what the right was doing. So what mistakes did Nikon and Canon make - to put themselves in a pickle today? They didn't make cell phones, or develop an operating system?
@@RockwoodJoe I'm as old as you, and I disagree with your disagreement. This video is spot on. Kodak's larger joust was to "guide" the market, not to "serve" the market. Their collapse was due to an inherent arrogance that they knew better than *_we_* did what *_we_* wanted. Their fingers were in their ears all the way down the toilet. I didn't know that they'd actually squelched this insane opportunity in 1976, but now knowing, everything makes sense. Astounding arrogance, fate fully deserved.
@@MultiCappie You make it sound as if Kodak acted as a "single" entity in their arrogance and decision making. They were huge, disjointed and, just like GM did (or still is) lacked any focus, other than being told from the top to be "profitable". Every business unit pushed forward in its own vision ignoring the future because they had to. Having owned three early DCS bodies, I can honestly say Kodak was leaps and bounds ahead of the competition for digital imaging. Did they squander it? Hell yeah!
No more discoveries of a shoebox filled with old photos taken by previous generations of your family. Just some old internal/external drive that has become obsolete or unreadable.
I’m glad someone’s mentioned this ‘elephant in the room’, paper photos have a level of ‘permanency’ and can immediately be seen/viewed, they can also be put in a frame for keeping around your house, I know you can get ‘digital frames’ but once again they have no level of ‘permanency’ because the pictures aren’t physically‘real’
I know someone who worked for Kodak/digital photography (once the company actually entered that market). He tells us that the employees from "the chemical side" would barely speak to the digital photography employees, because "That's not photography."
That's about the size of what really happened. The reasons are even sadder. Managers were fighting for prestigious offices and worrying about interoffice rivalries rather than running the company. The top managers wanted a cushy job where they didn't have to think or make decisions. They wanted to ride on what had been done by past generations. Kodak died from the top, while they still had some of the finest Engineers I've ever known.
I was around then, it was sheer mismanagement that killed Kodak. They died a death of a thousand cuts. There was no vision or even a real mission, it was purely about shareholder value.
How do you get access to all of this old archival footage? And why do I recognize most of your music from I Hate Everything? Is it some sort of stock music pack I'm not familiar with?
I doubt it, jet ink has solved the problem by going with external tanks, the so called "supertanks" rather than cartridges and seeling bottles of dirty cheap ink. I'm from Mexico and a bottle of Epson 100ml of ink costs me 70MXN or 3.3 USD and literally last almost a year. There is no other printing tech that is that as affordable, laser is just too expensive in comparison with that dirty cheap ink, at least in my country.
@@carlosdgutierrez6570 it's true but maybe someone could come up with a more convenient solution. Technology embrace by masses, most of the time, is based on conveniency and not only cost. The smartphones were heck a lot costly and had poor quality in comparisson to cameras back then but look at them now, commanding the market worldwide.
Went to photo school in LA years ago when film and transparencies ruled. I used to have my own darkroom at home, however, the chemicals used for developing film and printing were hazardous many people 'developing' dermatitis. Glad I switched to Photoshop. I scan many of my old film images and do not miss the 'old school' methods one bit.
I lived in RochesterNY when I was a boy. I swear half my relatives worked for Eastman Kodak. I remember there was one day a year Kodak used to rent some big amusement park and only employees and their families were allowed in. My uncle would take me and say I was one of his kids lol. I actually miss “real” photos. They were special. You didn’t waste film on ordinary things. Probably because both the film and the printing was so expensive. Today I use my iPhone for most pictures but still use a “real” camera for truly special pictures.
I'm a student at Rochester Institute of Technology, or RIT (NOT to be confused with RPI where Steven Sasson graduated, although my brother will be graduating from there) and we have a lot of professors who used to work at Kodak. What's interesting is that Kodak also invented OLED displays. Although I guess they sold this technology to Samsung and LG, which may have been yet another missed opportunity.
I worked for Kodak from 1998 to 2004. The reason Kodak shelved the digital camera is mainly because they produced a 36 exposure roll of film for about $0.25 and sold it for $12.00 and people had to pay another $10 to Kodak for developing. Film was a cash cow. It had little to do with the customer desire to have prints. They were addicted to the profit margin and had staid old men leading the company at the time of the market transformation.
"You have to adapt even if that means competing with yourself." It's so easy to sit here and judge Kodak, but what are we clinging onto in our lives, that once worked but is now slowly turning into our demise?
Amish still use horses and buggies and are still around. Although some women are getting jobs in offices as farmland is becoming more expensive. They only go to 8th grade of school.
I and the 10s of thousands of ex Kodak employees would tell you-you're partially correct. Kodak’s profits were always as a consumables company. Their hardware was break even at best. Though the world's largest imaging company, they were, in reality, a Chemical company, whose primary products were in imaging. Though digital photography has resulted in an explosion in the numbers of photos and videos taken, historians lament the passing of physical photos, as most people today are very lackadaisical in archiving their photos, let alone making Back-ups or actual hard copies using traditional silver-halide based prints. Kodak's core competency chemical technology spun-off as their Eastman Chemicals division in the mid-90s and they remain a market leader today, having brought to market Cyanoacrylate adhesives (super-glue), PTFE - Polyethylene Terephthalate, the clear now ubiquitous plastic used for soda and water bottles, and Kodel Polyester, famously used in the static-shock inducing carpets of the '60s and '70s. In short a technological powerhouse that fell victim to complacency.
I suspected Kodak was dead the minute I saw the first ad for the digital Mavica. I wanted a computer which could digitize, store and manipulate old photos, but the package wasn't available at a price the consumer could afford in the early 1980's, when I was running a B&W photo lab in Seattle.
I remember we had a digital camera at school back in the 80s. It only took B&W so to get color, you had to take 3 seperate photos with color wheels, then combine in the software. It was used mostly for converting existing photos into digital
As a person in their early 30s I plan on printing out a bunch of photos to hang on my walls. Just gotta get around to finding a quality place to do that... I still love my physical items. I even prefer CDs over digital music. It's just feels good knowing that it's all mine and won't disappear into cyberspace. Maybe I'm old.
My first digital camera was a Kodak. It doesn't take very good pictures although I still use it from time to time. It has a little bit better picture quality when compared to my cell phone,
Kodak was never gonna last. They weren’t a camera company. They were a film company. Sure they could’ve shifted but that would require so many changes It’s like people thinking Walmart should’ve been amazon. It’s hard to do something like that
My dad worked for Kodak for 20 years in the govt projects division. Time and again he'd say how upper management ineptitude sunk the company. They had a lot of patents that could have made them money but they squandered it all away.
Not sure I agree with your analysis. Even at their peak, wasn't the majority of revenue in the actual FILM, not the camera sales? People had Kodak cameras, and they may have been the most popular, but they also bought other brands. But the Kodak film fit in all the brands, and that was their major revenue stream. You sold a camera once, but sold lots of film for it... I can't imagine that even 50 percent of the 2018 digital camera market comes close in sales revenue (adjusted for inflation) that film sales did. For sure, no company is climbing the top 50 list on camera sales. Sony makes digital cameras sure... but they also make a TON of other stuff like TVs, the playstation, etc etc etc. No matter what, the company was headed for a huge fall once the digital age came into effect. Without film sales, no realistic amount of camera sales was going to keep the company on the top list of large companies or generate that kind of revenue.
Yep, This is why Kodak left the higher end of the camera trade in the 1960s, It was the FILM and PAPER that made the money. None of the most famous high end camera companies (Nikon, Pentax, Canon) were as large as Kodak as a company. One may have bought a camera once a decade, but they might buy film monthly or more. Consumer grade cameras were enough for Kodak to sell, and if people want to use Kodak film in a non Kodak camera, Good! I'm sure that Sony didn't mind me using a Sony tape in my JVC vcr, Sony still got some money from me.
The profits from film simply went away, they didn't move over to a new medium. They had set themselves up to be the kings of the consumer film market. They lasted over a century and the market eventually changed. In the history of corporations, their overall success is probably up there with just about anybody. 50 years from now, I bet most of the companies we think are "too big to fail" will be gone. Things could be way different in even 10 to 20 years.
As an amateur (and occasional professional) photographer, I'd speculated about the gradual demise of Kodak for more than a decade. This video confirms that my partially educated guesses were spot-on. After having owned & used a Canon 5D, I was lent a Kodak 14 mp digital camera to use on a job several years ago; as I expected, it was a piece of crap! The image was noisy and irreparably way off on color. Several reputable camera-makers had already pushed the technological envelope quite far before Kodak even began thinking that the quality of digitizing the images was the most important factor to the photographic market. I remember being one of the first to use digital cameras in the '90's, thinking that the absence of Kodak there was likely a mistake made by fossilized management enamored with the old technology they thought would survive! Business emulates nature, where any species must change or perish as the environment changes. Like George Eastman, they assumed their 'work was done', committing suicide without waiting... until it was too late.
There is a whole new generation that lost interest in digital cameras, because their smartphones are good enough for social media. On the other hand, things like instax, 35mm film and vintage cameras really grabs their attention. Hope Kodak adapts, stays true to their origins, and keeps providing their products to young artists and creatives. Young people run my local lab, that now develops a few hundred rolls a day and is dedicated to film only.
Reminds me of how Xerox perfected the graphical user interface, but the higher-ups couldn't see how it fit into their business model. They let Steve Jobs look at it, and now people think Apple invented it. A similar thing happened with IBM and personal computers: IBM was trying to protect their mainframe business, so didn't innovate, and was expensive.
Maybe, Apple was a computer and software company. Now it's a phone manufacturer that makes computers and tablets on the side. There is nothing wrong with being a phone manufacturer, but there are many others producing similar specification phones for less money.
@@jamesslick4790 thing is, their iPhone sales are starting to slump, and in some international markets (China specifically) their sales are starting to slump hard, and I don't recall Apple doing anything actually innovative in the last decade tbh, all they did was make consumers mad by removing the 3.5mm jack, literally everyone I see with those iPhones always use the adapter (sole exception to my stepfather who only uses it to call/text, we got it free as part of some deal with the phone company)
@@cpufreak101 We are in agreement, Apple put too many eggs in the iPhone basket, And the iPhone isn't spectacularly superior to other phone makers flagship models despite costing more (spec for spec) AND having customer unfriendly dis advantages like no 3.5mm audio jack, No Expandable storage and no user replaceable battery. (LOL, My cheapo LG Arista 2 has all three!). Meanwhile long time Mac users are pissed that no. real attention has been paid to higher end Mac computers. Apple Used to innovate, Now it's just a "name" that like "designer jeans" offer no real advantages over other brands besides repeat customers used to the OS.
@@Crashed131963 flash sticks fail the most often, i cannot tell you how many times I have had an sd card or flash drive die on me. It's way safer to keep them on a hard drive over a flash drive, or even better keep my film with my passport and BC and then reprint them if in the rare case my house burns down.
I loved working at Kodak Australia. I remember at a film launch the Kodak speaker spoke briefly about digital cameras. In his words, don't be scared of digital cameras they will never replace film. 2 years later all our Kodak owned stores were closed.
Kodak were patent trolls and had all their patents tied up in emulsion and chemistry, allowing global dominance in motion picture and manufacture under license. Edison and Kodak had too many patents, which drove a considerable backlash and established Hollywood, far from operations in New York. Digital wasn't seen as a threat because the resolution of a CCD array could never approach the molecular structure of film (a single 8x10" transparency rates at 4640 megapixels). What they didn't see coming were DSP algorithms, the software that makes awful pictures look okay. Digital didn't sink Kodak, they still dominated motion picture even after camera manufacturers moved to digital -- what sank them, and Leica, Pentax, Contax, Ilford, Fuji, Polaroid etc. etc... was the cameraphone. Once that tech hit the big screen, Kodak and their patents no longer mattered.
I worked for Kodak for over 25 years.While I was there, we saw one bad CEO after another. Add to that a never ending supply of worthless, lazy do nothing middle managers.It was a sinking ship for many years.To bad because it really was a great company at one time.I was proud to tell people I worked for Eastman Kodak.
Well guess what? I'd love to be able to print my photos again. Having a physical copy of the moments I love the most beats having then be lost on a phone that runs out of space. Or have the phone currupt or lose the images if my phone decides to be stupid. Print stores charge too much and it would be nice to print from the comfort of my home.
Interesting, in the early nineties I used to call on Kodak in Hemel Hempstead UK as an airline sales representative. I broached the subject of how the future was in digital, and they just sort of laughed, saying pros would never go digital. Not the only time this sort of thing has happened, I was chatting with Manfred Mann over a cup of tea about tech a few years later, he had just bought a serous SSL mixing desk for a shed load of money, and at the same time Yamaha had released their Promix-01, an automated digital desk which when connected to a 1Gb external hard drive and a 486 PC became an audio recording station. I said , with the advent of the Yamaha desk, kids would be making serious music in their back bedrooms. Manfred said there would always be a need for studios. Both of us were right.
In the autumn/winter of 1977, Kodak began marketing it's foray into the instant film camera: The Kodamatic. I remember it well because my father & I had our picture taken before a large promotional banner for it at our local K-Mart. My mom was so impressed with the color rendering, she insisted my dad one of the models offered. It served us well... until film got scarce. And by then, I had my camera: A Kodak Disc.
I visited Rochester, NY, the HQ of Kodak, around 1999. Fuji film was "the enemy". -- you couldn't buy a roll of Fuji film in any store there. But the real enemy was the management who refused to fully embrace digital photography and made bad blunders. Film gave them a constant income stream. However, digital photography is like a hardware company -- you only make money on new products releases, not on consumables, i.e. film. Kodak thought at-home digital printing would be the digital equivalent income stream, but they were wrong. Kodak really needed to embrace a completely different business model and redesign their entire R&D efforts on a hardware-centric model. Poor Rochester -- Kodak and Xerox are a shell of their former self.
I remember being in Rochester around 2012 (and I think it was just a week or 2 before Kodak went bankrupt) the three things I remember was just how "dirty" the whole place was becoming, how dead and empty the Kodak buildings seemed, and my stepfather running a red light :/
I worked in the photo business from 1971 through 1990. Kodak could never figure out what business they wanted to be in. They didn't recognize they were in the IMAGING business and not just the film and paper business. They would dabble in a market segment, spend a lot of money, and then exit. As an example, in the early 1980's Kodak decided they wanted to be in the video business so they outsourced building Kodak consumer video cameras to several Japanese manufacturers - and didn't sell very many Kodak video cameras, so they dropped that line of equipment. Then they got into video tape, built an entirely new factory and made, probably, the best video tape on the market. We had dropout logging equipment and when we compared Sony tape, Fuji tape, and Kodak tape, the Kodak has the least amount of dropouts and the highest quality cassettes for U-matic tape (3/4-inch). The Kodak 1-inch tape was in high demand by professionals and television stations because of the quality - but, in reality that's a small market. Within three years they were out of the tape business. Then they repeated the same thing with floppy disks, and CD's. You could go on and on about the market entrances, and exits - there were many - all the time ignoring electronic imaging of all types. I loved Kodak products. They were always the highest quality as Kodak quality control was the best in the world. Unfortunately, their business acumen within the imaging market was not the equal of their quality control.
This has lessons for politics as well. We can either look to the future and be willing to change and adapt, or we can try to hopelessly hold on to the past and false notions of past greatness.
It's also important to note that Kodak ignored the feedback offerred by Faith Popcorn Brain Reserve (FPBR), a trend forecasting company which came to the conclusion in the late 80s that the future of film was digital. Kodak was unwilling to accept her teams conclusion and fired them. Rest is history.
why does this keep happening? every industry giant that has ever died always died for not adapting blockbuster also died because they thought people actually cared about buying dvds and not just viewing the movies and refused to adapt
Yes, it was a mistake but something must be said too. There is a little context understandably left out of this narrative because on nowadays’ perspective it seems so obvious (a kind of a Captain Hindsight issue here). People on those days did want to have “something palpable” whether to see or to store their photos, computers back then not only weren’t that common as to think that every house had at least some device that could act as one (as phone that nowadays is a de facto little computer) and those PC that existed were slow, not that easy to use, had specific software that had to be acquired (not downloaded) that were very specific for whatever brand that they were intended for, a PC could break (and people may not had been fond or knowledgeable of the VERY SLOW process of continuously backing up their stuff) and Internet (when it began) was not the big compendium of “everything you want to know with just two clicks away” that is today). There wasn’t “a cloud” either. Digital technology, in context, was a kind of a fancy, very ugly LOW RESOLUTION, clumsy, complex new technology that few take seriously and it was (comparatively) VERY EXPENSIVE too. It also meant that it was very easy to lose whatever that you recorded. Printing or storing in some recording palpable device wasn’t an old man’s attempt to avoid the passing of time but the logical bridge from the old to the new until people felt safe (and all the problems I mentioned became inexistent or irrelevant).
@@shiwomino5775 well, we are living in an age where the tech revolution is going so fast. It took is thousands of years to innovate from the chariot and carriage to the first internal combustion automobiles, but it took us more than a century to go from those cars to the creation of electric cars. It took us 60 years from inventing aeroplanes to going to the moon. It took us 40-50 years from the giant WW2 computers to the internet. It took us about 40 years from Marie Curie getting the Nobel Price in Physics for discovering radioactivity to the Manhattan Project and the first atom bombs. It took us less than 40 years from the world's first "brick" cell phone to the iPhone that has touch screen tech and internet capabilities. It's hard to guess what's the next big thing would be, but given that despite poor resolutions and storage capabilities back then, almost about everyone is ready to welcome the digital age.
Fascinating that the first Sony Mavica looks pretty much exactly like a modern mirrorless camera, yet most other early digital cameras that followed it ended up going for a radically different design, some looking more like binoculars than cameras.
This video draws some pretty misleading conclusions. The digital camera revolution didn't kill Kodak, the smartphone revolution did, just as it also killed the the rest of the consumer digital camera market (and is now whittling away at the bottom of the enthusiast digital camera market). Kodak was a market leader through the early digital camera revolution, unfortunately their only other significant investments were in physical image reproduction (professional and consumer printing), and digital publishing and distribution killed that right about the same time as smartphones killed their consumer imaging investments. Kodak had no significant electronics manufacturing base to continue producing digital cameras at cutthroat margins, and by the time the threat of smartphones was apparent, Apple and Samsung were unassailable. On top of it all, they had significant pension obligations to continue funding through and after the 2008 recession, so they had little latitude to just burn their product portfolio down and start over. Sometimes history just picks winners and losers, and this time Kodak was the loser, even though they made the right moves at the right time.
@@MrQwertypoiuyty Kodak had no real professional DSLR presence because the industry was nearly standardized around Canon and Nikon (Kodak's DSLRs were even just Kodak sensors in Nikon bodies), the consumer digital market was their only growth path in digital imaging. But the death of the consumer digicam market is what killed them. Even for the companies you listed, the future isn't great. Mirrorless is killing DSLR. Premium phones are attacking the prosumer digital camera market now. Canon makes far more money from medical imaging and Business document reproduction services these days than they do digital cameras, it's completely arguable that they're not even a camera company any longer. There's other camera companies that made the jump to digital to only to fall on hard times: Konica-Minolta (sold the camera division to Sony), Pentax (got absorbed first by Hoya then sold to Ricoh), Hasselblad (owned by by a private equity firm now, with minority ownership by DJI). The four you listed + Panasonic can afford to stay in the game because they're well diversified and don't depend solely on digital cameras.
Jason Osmond, you dumbazz. Digital camera did kill kodak in the early 2000s. When i saw a digital camera for the first time in 2002, i loved it at first sight. You can take as many photos as you like without worrying about film and can review them instantly. Smartphone cameras gotten better in 2010, that was 10 years later while kodak was already dying from digital cameras. Kodak should have released their digital camera first, evolve it and keep up the creativity for it. They didn't do that wanted to milk their films as much as they can until the day no one cared about it anymore.
Montgomery Wards, Kodak, Sears, all were once brands on-par with Costco, Apple and Amazon. When I was a kid, the thought of those institutions disappearing would have been a laughable and frightening thought, but now they are either dead or on the verge. Let it be a lesson to Costco, Apple and Amazon!
It's like who dares wins. Kodak unfortunately didn't "dare" to step up from a chemical-paper etc company to become a creator of an innovation that would change the photography world forever
I worked as beta tester for the Kodak digital event photography system in 1998. They knew the shift to Digital would DESTROY the market for proper Photography. And it did.
FUN FACT: Kodak also invented the white OLED back in the 1970s, which is currently used by LG to make their industry-leading OLED TVs. Kodak sat on the patent for this white OLED for years, before selling it to LG who brought it to market - where they currently dominate every other company producing OLED TVs. The white OLED technology is critical to allowing LG to dominate, because having a white OLED with a color filter placed on top of it allows a much higher yield (fewer manufacturing defects) and reduces pixel count by using a single OLED vs using 4 RGB OLEDs to make each pixel in a standard RGB-style OLED display. The white OLED also mostly eliminates much of the "burn in" effect that some colored OLED panels suffer from, where one "sub pixel" (one of the RGB OLEDs) starts to become dimmer than the others after some extended use, causing a permanent change in that pixel that leaves a 'ghost' image in some areas of the screen where static content is displayed.
That is not true, it's a myth they ignored it. First commercial digital cameras with good quality were kodak and they keep doing for a while. I bought myself one around 2000 and was a good camera. The problem is that Kodak was never a high end camera manufacturer, only point a click and a bit better than that. It never tried to access to the SLR market because they had no experience on it. As a point a click camera they had no way to compete with Canon, Nikon etc doing similar products and in addition of the that DSLR. If the idea is that they ignored it before then 2000 and did little with the patents, perhaps. But digital cameras before that time were expensive toys very far of the film cameras. There was no market there. We need to remember that even a expensive Canon DSLR from 2003 had a lot less quality than a current phone, imagine 5 years before. Kodak was mainly a film and point a click industry, being the film more important. Film disappears and point and click becomes too competitive for a brand without tradition of high quality cameras.
@@Texeyevideo they aparently did also dslr: Kodak DCS Pro 14n It was not based in Nikon, it was very superior to the D100 as it was a full sensor 35mm camera when Nikon was cropped (4533 x 3022 versus 3029 x 1980 Nikon)
@@karlpj1 But it had a horrible sensor that couldn't be used above ISO 80, and even at the base ISO any underexposure resulted in virtually uncorrectable amounts of noise. I know because I briefly owned one and it's successor the DSLR/N
"If you don't cannibalize yourself, someone else will." - Steve Jobs. When everyone else thought iPhone would make iPod obsolete
Everyone thought it was a joke when they released the latest iPod Touch, but it still does really well.
steve jobs was a moron, lol
@@itsMe_TheHerpes It just depends on the topic. When it came to following good medical advice when you have cancer, yeah not so smart. But, marketing and leading development on consumer electronic devices, very smart.
@@overbeb he was not smart, he was malefic. he changed the game in electronic devices allright... he changed it form an industry that was meant to serve the consumer, into an industry that enslaves the consumer and demeans the consumer. there is no respect what so ever for the customer, and all companies are the same now.
@@overbeb and again i am mad about that idiotic hell's minion called steve jobs. ugh. you can't get anything good these days because him and the likes of him. world wide social engineering is a frustrating and scary thing.
I was sad to see Kodak go. My first digital camera was a Kodak, in 2006. I bought it because I knew and trusted the Kodak name.
amazingly despite all this they still have a consumer division
Kodak didn't make anything. It was an Altek or Sanyo camera
This is why apple kills off it's own products like the ipod before someone else does. Replace or be replaced.
Well, the iPod Touch is still a thing, and the Android companies don't seem to want to have any stake in that particular market.
sadly, I dont think apple has the ingenuity to create the next big thing anymore
@@sonicboy678 that market being...? Considering an iPod is the same as an iPhone but without mobile connectivity and cheaper, you can get a still cheaper Android phone which has the option.
@@xerzy But there's no point in getting a phone if you don't plan to use it as such, especially since it would hardly be effective as one without a carrier. Also, I really don't see how that reasoning can hold up in the face of tablets, considering that the vast majority of those run on the same operating systems as phones, but with far more bulk (hell, some are limited to Wi-Fi, just like the iPod Touch).
If Samsung still made the Galaxy Player (or another company proved willing to compete in that market) I wouldn't be bringing this up.
I'd recommend waiting for Apple to discontinue the iPod Touch before claiming/implying that there's no market for it.
Apple literally quit reporting Ipod sales they are so bad, way back in 2015. Sales when from an average of 10 million a quarter to 3 a quarter before they quit reporting them.
Your argument makes no sense... tablets exist because people want a larger screen to watch video/work on vs a phone, not because they want a 10 inch music player lol. The fact that tablets and phones all do the exact same thing an ipod does is why they are going the way of the dodo.
Android/Samsung didn't decide to stop selling music only players because they just wanted to loose money... they got out of a market that was disappearing and left Apple to provide for what little market was left.
This is a very lightweight analysis of the situation with Eastman Kodak. Fujifilm in Tokyo faced the same situation but pivoted successfully. The problem wasn't that Kodak didn't see the potential in digital cameras; the problem was there wasn't - and still isn't - high margins in the part of consumer market Kodak had access to. Film and paper have enormous high margins, and shareholders were demanding a return on this investment.
At its core, Kodak was a chemicals company with world-class expertise in coating materials at high speed, in total darkness, with near-perfect quality. They ran out of things to coat. Meanwhile, Fujifilm has pivoted to pharmaceuticals and cosmetics, while keeping its photography business alive and well.
Printing pictures is still a multi-billion-dollar business, too.
Yeah, he's fallen prey to the common pop-culture understanding of why Kodak failed, a myth that sounds "truthy" and is easy to repeat, but doesn't actually bear up under analysis.
While you are undoubtedly right on a number of points, I think the line “they ran out of things to coat” is a little too easy, and again runs into the problem of a snappy line that sounds like the truth but is quite a bit removed from it.
The very special kind of coating that Kodak had the most and almost monopolistic expertise in was coating of emulsion on celluloid. But they also had a truckload of expertise in doing CCD sensors and decades of patents. They invented the Bayer filter FFS!
It was a number of things that took them down. For instance the trial with Polaroid and its consequences. The blatantly unfair monopoly verdict. The APS and Disc camera flops. And the difficulty in leveraging their sensor and associated algorithms.
@@Frisenette Well, I was keeping things simple, for the sake of the UA-cam audience. I agree with you on their expertise. For one thing, they co-developed the OLED screen, and even tried to become an OEM supplier of screens. Kodak even put an OLED screen on a digital camera, long before one appeared on a smartphone.
My objection to this video is that Kodak did not stop innovating at all. Today, if Kodak were a startup, they'd be lauded for the failures and be given billions in VC money.
Gary Pageau agreed.
Interesting couple of videos you got there BTW. :-)
@@Frisenette To be fair APS was not really a flop, but a victim of timing. It did have a decent run given the era. (1996-2011) It was also not just a Kodak,product It was supported by all of the major consumer film companies. Disc WAS a flop as its negatives were about half the size of the 110 cartridge format leading to fairly bad enlargements.
A Kodak rep spoke at my film school in '97. I asked what he thought about HD and digital. He chuckled and said, " we're not worried about it. They will never match film."
He was half right about that. Up until a few years much of the feature length live-action/hybrid movies were shot on film.
Some directors still use film for their movies... but there is one advantage to digital: lighting. You can shoot a night scene with a good digital camera almost by moonlight alone. Try that with film and it will be darker than battle with the Night King on game of thrones!
Pop Films When I went to the Canadian Rockies in 2006 I took 4500 photos - dread to think what the cost would have taken that with film.
@@ojonasar How many of those 4500 photos are keepers? I get eight exposures on a 120 roll of Ilford FP4 and try very hard to make every one count.
johnm2012 I’ve kept them all; any non- keepers can always be retaken and the time, another great thing with digital. As a rough estimate, I would have spent something like £1200 if I had used film - more than I spent on the flights there and back.
That's how you destroy your own company kids.
What a sad story can we get 500 likes
It also destroyed the city pretty much
Why destroy? You got up, you get down, that is how it works, nothing last forever...
Destroy your company... Destroy your mom... Semantics.
Xerox did the same thing
The funny thing, is Kodak hired a consulting firm to analyze their business model and they told them film was dying, but they continued to hold on to the belief that they were too big, to fail.
same as ibm
@@anandhua.b4589 And same as the Oil Companies believe themselves to be. Seriously. Those folks make their livings, built their whole smoking Empire, off of Dead Dinosaurs™. And still can't see what happens when you refuse to evolve.
As a non-businessman, I so see the absolute brilliance of taking a non-renewable commodity, and selling it to go Up In Smoke, with NO BACKUP PLAN. At least the Tobacco Pushers can grow more tobacco... I don't see any way to grow more Dead Dinosaurs, so that junkies can keep getting their fixes of it.
Coff coff Nokia
Jameel Ja, would you be willing to lay off 1000s and effect another 1000 families from decreased income (a lot of small to medium business, Kodak was their #1 customer), for some fuzzy image that would need at least a decade of tech innovations to be come profitable ?
@@tomservo5007 no, for sure not, but they could have continued to improve the technology and when the time was perfect create a digital camera and phase out film. Insuring a seamless transition for their employees.
Eastman's last note should have read "My works done, try not to f*&k it up"
George Eastman is the anonymous (for a long time) benefactor that gave the Masschusetts institute of technology enough money to move form its crowded and tiny Boston campus to a way, way larger campus in Cambridge. There was enough money to build a huge and monumental neoclassical main building but most importantly, the money allowed MIT to not have to be bought out by Harvard to become Harvard's school of engineering.
Eastman did something else that was amazing. His enormous mansion had a central "Trophy Room" and he wanted to make it almost twice as large while keeping the rest of the house the same. Everbody said that was impossible but he finally found one contractor that said that he would raise the house off of its foundation, split in the middle, move the two sides apart and fill in the middle again. He did it!
To be completely fair to Kodak, the first error was stupid, but the second was an easy one to make once upon a time. What people did with photos was look at physical copies of them. Digital photos were awkward to store, didn't have the resolution they have now, and weren't easy to leaf through on most computers from 15 years ago. Why *wouldn't* you want a physical copy?
Then social media happened.
Not just social media, but the fact that in a matter of a few years, nearly everyone had access to a device that, for the same price as a digital camera, could take photos, store them, display them, and effortlessly share them wirelessly to anyone else in the world within seconds of capturing the image. Who would buy a consumer digital camera + inkjet printer (Kodak's bread and butter) after that?
your talking crap man, 20 years ago i was using my computer for viewing photos and keeping them and back in 1996-1997ish i was burning images and video to my CD burner using windows95 oO
Agree totally! This video fast-forwards through 2001 to 2011 (i.e from Kodak easy-share to instagram). There is a metric TON of of the exact issues you mention that simply changed the entire medium. And it is also disingenuous to mobile device technology, without which there would be no instagram or photography as, sadly, >90% of consumers know it today.
@@Yahgiggle That part is true, But 20 years ago no one had an easy way share photos quickly. send a bunch of photos to someone on dial-up at 56k (assuming actuality could connect at 56k...)? good luck! Showing digital photos meant either printing them or handing out CDs. What changed the necessity to print was portable high resolution devices like smartphones, tablets. (snapshots are no longer in my wallet because of it.) Sharing online became only practical with the ubiquity of high speed internet. Plus 20 years ago consumer grade digital cameras where about as good as a still from a VHS tape,meaning for most people the only way to get a decent digital image was to shoot on fim and scan. It was a reasonable bet then to expect people to want to print.
@@jamesslick4790 thats untrue too we sent photos by that 56k modem in emails dont forget photos back then used to be tiny 640x480 was awesome lol
I miss hard copy photos. I still print mine sometimes. Art photos belong in a frame.
I agree, I'm very interested in Instax right now. Imagining endless possibilities for art.
Digital is better. I never liked hard copies.
As a photographer who shoots 90% film. Kodak is still very much alive. Film prices are only maybe $2-3 higher than they were 20 years ago (depending where you shop). And Kodak released two new film stocks in 2018. Something that no other major film company has done in years.
I shoot some film from time to time and can agree, film is Still cheap (not using your phone camera cheap but Still cheap enough) even from Kodak, it's just that the Kodak today really isn't the same Kodak as in the past, their size is drastically reduced
But, where do you develop such film nowadays?
@@jsprite123 Google it. There's still lots of places to do it.
Kodak had a lot of problems not talked about here. They were so profitable for so long that everything they did was top heavy with cost and over-engineered. Fujifilm was cutting into their film sales because they were making their products in lights-out factories that were essentially identical, i.e. lower cost, more efficient. Kodak responded to this competition by trashing Fujifilm, saying their color was inferior. All the while consumers were buying more Fujifilm.
You could write a big book on this very interesting subject. I saw it firsthand as a software vendor to Kodak in the late 1990s when they were unraveling.
@@jsprite123 Either at home or in some of the labs still around
That's one bad ass suicide note!
yea it kinda is actually. sounds like he had a long life (77 yrs old), was satisfied and felt accomplished, and thought his death through and was sure before doing it.,so why is it described as "tragic"?
@@conwaymj88 yep, once I feel my work is done
#LifeGoals
No, seriously
The thrill is gone, and I'm outta here...
@@thechief00 sounds more like a man who fails at the transition from work to retirement because he never learnt to enjoy anything and gets depressed imho but this kind of shit is not uncommon among CEOs so no surprise there
I did a college level year long film course. At the last week or two, 2 Kodak employees came in, talked about film stock and how "it's long from dead" and showed a half hour DVD they produced with Hollywood heavyweights focusing on the pros on film, and cons of digital.
Kodak announced bankruptcy not even two weeks later.
Ironic that the two Kodak reps made a presentation with a DVD. It would have made an impression on me (if I was part of your film class) if they wheeled in a film projector and showed their production made with their very own Kodak film.
Damn that's sad
On...DVD?
Umm...
Oh the irony
A million years ago, when I worked in photography shops, the Kodak rep would swagger in like he owned the place, and, actually, he did. He'd bring with him the goodies and news of more to come. "Big Yellow" was no idle boast.
Those same reps would go back to Kodak marketing and tell them what their customers wanted and the marketing geniuses would reply "We know what customers want better than they do". Small markets didn't interest them, but it did interest Fuji!!
kodak tried. they tried hard to shift to digital. they could not do it. their was literally nothing they could do about it.
the "profit margin" on film was so insanely incredibly obnoxiously huge that "NO" replacement technology no matter how good could replace that. and they knew it. they understood they were dead and there was nothing they could do about it.
the "size and scope" of kodak was supported by the insane profit margins on film which "could never ever be sustained" in a digital world. and they knew it.
its like if you made hotdogs that people bought every single week a huge number of people and you sold them for $7 a pop and it costs you a nickle to make each one.
then someone comes along and says hey you can do it all for nearly $0.00 per shot.
there is just nothing they could do to replace that $6.95 per profit margin that their entire company was based around. nothing.
kodak of all companies knew exactly what was coming and they also knew. they understood. that their was literally nothing they could do about it. absolutely nothing. which kind of sucks. but that is the nature of digital I guess.
there was no "adapt" their was no "compete" sure they could dominate the digital photo market. even if they dominated 10 to 1 against everyone else they would still go bankrupt because their entire company was literally sat upon the shoulders of the insane profit margin of film and NO amount of digital market share even 100% could replace that profit margin. ever.
That is an interesting view. If true, it seems like the company leaders could have at least put some defensive measures in place to prevent bankruptcy. Like pay off all or most of debt and be prepared to downsize in stages if needed. I know that's easy to say now with 20/20 hindsight but still...I remember thinking even in the early 2000's that it was just a matter of time before going to the store to develop film disappeared forever.
way to much overhead is my head. ie they were just too large.
I doubt it would work if they downscaled to 20% of original size (I have no data purely a guess out my butt)
they were just SO freaking huge because the profit margins were just so huge.
@@AaronSmith1
Very true. Thank you for saying this because alot of people don't seem to understand this. Even if Kodak was the king of digital photography there's still no way they could have survived going from the massive profit margins of film to the slim pickings of digital.
And on top of that, dedicated digital cameras completely died off as soon as camera phones caught on. The exception being in professional and hobbyist photography, but they've never had much of a presence in that scene anyways, even in the days of film. They've always been about the mass consumer market.
They could have diversified. They put all the eggs in one basket i.e. relying on films and films alone. They were using the profits from films to "innovate" on film cameras. If they did embrace the digital camera, they could focus their research on that, and move on to be the first company with a digital camera. With digital cameras on the market, they can then downsize their film productions which can cut costs, and fund more research. Sure, they won't be making that huge amount of profits anymore, but they can keep the company going for longer, until the next big opportunity for innovation arrives, which in current time, the mobile phone cameras for the general public, or high end cameras for photographers.
They were either shortsighted, or the executives just wanted profits to go on for more bonus, since it is none of their problem if the company filed for bankruptcy in the near future. They still get paid nonetheless.
@Joe Black I think you are right and make a great case... but look at it this way.. Kodak had the money to invest in finding the next big thing... they were too focused on sustaining their own position rather than discovering a new position. It would be like an investor only investing in one type of business rather than diversifying their portfolio. Kodak could have and should have been Windows or Facebook if they had the vision...
why print it when you can see it ?
Because photos printed on paper never become obsolete thus losing them forever on a disc that can no longer be accessed.
I am old enough to remember when digital cameras weren't really a thing yet. The quality and clarity of phone cameras today still amazes me. I can take up zoomed photos of insects at night and get high detail. You almost never even use a flash anymore. Man technology is so cool.
So Kodak went down because they wanted people to keep needing to buy film.
Basically yes - they failed to understand that if they did not push it, 100's of others would.
Film, and printing paper, and developing chemicals, and film processing services.
Eastman Kodak was essentially a chemical company, that sold cameras to ensure future sales of it's photographic chemicals and film products.
@@bobweiss8682 it's kinda asking a lot for a chemical company full of chemical/electrical engineers to pivot into becoming a software/hardware company overnight.
@@shiwomino5775 you can put lipstick on a pig, but it's still a pig.
Nokia failed because thinked people still want analogic keyboard.
BlackBerry failed because thinked people don't need apps.
And so on, embrace the evolution or go extinct.
Last time I was this early Kodak was successful
Wow
that burns.
Early for what exactly?
Kid nowadays do not know what is kodak.
Not even a comprehendible sentence and still 171 likes? Well fluffy bunnies murder bicycles envelope sewage townsfolk. There...that should be good for 300 likes.
Any parallel universe that Kodak embraced digital photography would probably be a universe that Instagram and Vine is owned by Kodak.
Got my first camera in 1958. My collection includes most of the classics shown. My last intentional use of film was 2001. It was said in the 70's that photography would become a truer art form when the materials were as cheap as pencil and paper... That time came... R.I.P. Kodak....
This understates (...well, doesn't state at ALL actually...) one of Kodak's most dominant sectors for decades, medical imaging. Kodak's revenue stemmed from far more than selling 35mm film to consumers. X-ray film (just one sheet of which was about 6x the surface area of an entire roll of Kodachrome) and, later, laser printing equipment (once radiology moved to digital CR/DX), were enormous profit centers.
Walgreens still sends out to develops 35 mm film last time I talked to them about it which was not that long ago.
The one innovation you missed out was Polaroid instant photos. I say this because Kodak launched its own version of a "Polaroid" Camera in breach of Polaroid patents. Law suit lost Kodak not only had to pay a massive payment to Polaroid for blatant breach of patents but where ordered, by the court, to buy back every Kodak Camera based on Polaroid technology. They were further ordered to replace each Kodak camera with a Polaroid. It cost Kodak $ Billions.
BUT I thought that your video was very good at showing Kodak with their Head in the Sand.
Thank you, sorry I hadn't picked this up earlier.
Kodak had rooms full of documentation showing the differences between Kodak and Polaroid film systems. The judge hearing the suit wouldn't allow Kodak to present ANY of that documentation. Oh, gee, did it matter that the judge didn't recuse herself for owning Polaroid stock?!!! At one point in time, Kodak made peel- apart instant film for Polaroid.
Kodak as we knew it back in the days of film cameras was doomed regardless of what they did. Their real moneymakers were always film, which was killed by digital photography, and making hard copies of photos, which was killed by the internet. If they had embraced digital photography from early on the only thing it would have achieved is sped up the death of the film business, one of the two things that really made money for them. In other words; They didn't do anything stupid, their business model was just killed by the unyielding march of technology.
Imagining any best case scenario of being a digital camera manufacturer makes Kodak automatically a much smaller company than they were at their peak.
Unfortunately for the public, when innovation happen in monopolistic companies the launch is delayed or cancelled. This has happened many times, some of which we haven't heard off as they are kept secret. Our capitalistic system has its flaws.
They could have diversified more don't put all your eggs in one basket.
my mom worked for kodak for over 30 years, started in the 70s and thought she was going to retire with that job- but with digital cameras getting so popular in the 00s, their plants started closing and finally, theirs was closed too. i know there were other factors that went into the demise, but it's sort of crazy to think that the digital camera was being developed just as my mom started to work there, kind of like her fate was sealed before she even got started
She did well and hung on longer than most. Kodak provided good jobs for a lot of people and took care of your family and fed you. You owe a debt to Kodak for raising you. Respect to Kodak the true father of photography. 👏
I can hear all these oil companies and car manufacturers saying that electric cars will never replace fuel based cars...
Well, film cameras are still around, they just became a niche thing for photo enthusiasts. Which most probably will happen to gas cars.
Every car manufacturer of consequence has EVs now.
You still burn stuff to get that electricity nowadays.
They never will. Batteries are just fundamentally less energy dense than petrol. There is no technology that can beat thermodynamics.
@Rich 91 Not in energy per volume you cannot.
Grew up in Rochester just a few blocks from the old Eastman house and with the Kodak plant within bicycling distance. Cool to see local history put into a video documentary like this.
This is where we are with environnemental issues. We could embrace change, create jobs and become technological leaders in wind and solar energy, smart grids, clean transportation, and have cleaner, healthier air, but we insist on defending fossil fuels in fear of change. Kodak had a 15 years head start, and the resources to make the most out of the change ahead of them. We are in the same position today.
Sad
Not at all the same
Not even remotely the same. Explain to me exactly WHO the customers are for all of this wonderful, expensive, unproven, and unworkable technology? Which consumers want a less reliable, more expensive electrical network with higher maintenance costs, large amounts of time when power is unavailable, common brown outs, and other huge pains in the ass? Where are the customers who want to pay 2-3x the times for this "clean transportation" you speak of? If it's so popular why aren't busses, trains, and subways literally packed to the gills with customers, instead of needing federal, state, and local subsidy just to exist?
Digital cameras came to be popular and take over virtually the entire camera market when they became VIABLE. Digital cameras are popular now because they are cheap, reliable, and improve on the product they replaced. They make as good of/better a picture as the common Kodak cameras of yesteryear, cost about the same, and offer the advantage of at home printing/see your picture before printing, plus they can take virtually unlimited photos with one cheap SD card.
What you, and others, would have us do is try to artificially accelerate the development of all this "wonder technology" by forcing a unprepared product on a unwilling population. Nobody was tripping over themselves to buy that first digital camera, which would have cost thousands upon thousands of dollars to create a picture only as good as a 50 dollar camera, while being impossible to carry around and insanely slow (records on a digital tape). This is "green" energy/transportation right now.
This is the scam behind climate change... people getting rich because a very expensive, unwanted product is being forced down the public's throat. The reality is, all of this technology was coming anyway. We have literally spent TRILLIONS attempting to force the equivalent of a 1970s digital camera on the public, when the 2000's digital camera was coming anyway. Nothing stops technological advancement, nothing can stop science from proceeding. The real question is... are you really willing to entirely destroy the middle class and impoverish two generations of Americans so that we can arrive at a "green" economy 1-2 decades early?
Think I am exaggerating? Look at the Paris Climate Accord you no doubt cried over when the US pulled out. Estimates from pro environmental groups (let alone honest ones) calculated that to meet the accord's goals in the US, the average American's electrical bill would need to increase by a factor of ten between 2020 and 2030. This means that if you currently have a 100 dollar a month bill you would be looking at a 1000 dollar a month bill by 2030. Personally I would have been looking at a bill in 2030 of around 1,750-2000 dollars a month just for electricity. That's nearly double my mortgage payment!
@@testy462 You are obviously a climate change denier so no amount of argumentation from me can change your mind about that. But my point was that this story is a good analogy to our current situation: it's about embracing change.
Sure, they couldn't have launched a digital camera in the 70s, but they had no excuse to be late in the game and let competitors win the battle. And what I think you missed is that change is not always a choice. Kodak couldn't do anything against the arrival of digital cameras, but they could at least be prepared. Climate change and other environnemental issues are a thing and if we don't act, we are going to face even bigger issues. Health issues linked to pollution are real, communities are getting progressively destroyed by rising water levels, droughts, disappearance of natural resources vital to local economies... It's estimated hundreds of millions of people will have to migrate due to climate change.
Now, you're right, those technologies are not ready, and are, for now, expensive. But it's up to us to work on those issues and make them cheaper and better. We can create local jobs that can't be relocated in other countries. China is far from being a green country, but they are investing a LOT in solar, batteries and other critical technologies because they know there's a lot of money in those. It's up to us to compete.
That's interesting. I was thinking the same things while watching the video. I don't have a solar panel or EV yet but it is a future we are moving into.
As a photography enthusiast, I thought Canon and Nikon will have a similar fate ignoring/delaying mirrorless cameras. It was quite late though. A year or two ago, I am expecting them to enter the smartphone industry as their expertise can be of value. However, it feels quite late again now that Huawei and others are releasing ridiculously featured camera systems with at least two cameras per phone.
I worked there as an intern (BSEE) in summers of 1987 and 1988.
First summer: on mega-printing machine for the big “mail order” labs. Project was millions over budget but any-price-was-worth-it, because it would keep Kodak set as THE supplier of printing paper and chemicals for the labs.
Second summer: “Imaging Electronics Center, East” doing research on truly-digital imaging (CCD sensors, modern electronics, digital compensation for imperfect lensing, printing dithering techniques).
While was back at college for the last year in my bachelor’s degree, CEO Coby Chandler said, ‘we are a CHEMICAL company, not an imaging company’, and shut down the center.
I went into a different industry, but watched the city of Rochester deteriorate alongside Kodak through the eyes of family members that stayed with Kodak till nearly the bitter end.
Thank you for this well-assembled review of the rise and fall of this once-great man and enterprise!
4:30 but they missed setting up online storage (Google Drive, etc) and - even worse for a print company - printed personalised gifts like cards, mugs, t-shirts, photobooks.
You are correct, had they focus on online storage they would have been the instagram.
I heard that Kodak missed another boat as well. The inventor of the photocopy system offered the patent for sale to Kodak but they rejected it because the resolution was too low for commercial application! Haliod Photographic went into partnership with the inventor and formed Xerox. Big mistake.
"To my friends, My work is done--, Why wait?"
Succinct and to the point. This man knew what he was doing.
He was kinda in a wheelchair...something that wasn't well looked upon and had other health issues
Just like when Tower Records laughed at MP3’s and iTunes! BTW, way before Steve’s and other digital cameras, the Polaroid instant SX70 camera got them real nervous as well.
You didn't include anything positive though! Kodak Alaris, the subsidiary of Kodak now responsible for producing photo film is still in business and seeing increased sales as more and more people beginning getting back into analog photography. The analog renaissance has been slow and steady, with major boosts from stars like Kendall Jenner and Lorde. Additionally, many filmmakers got together to force producers to bankroll a portion of production costs for Kodak's motion picture film. Filmmakers like Christopher Nolan have even gone so far as to say they'll quit filmmaking altogether if they can't shoot their films on authentic film. Long live Kodak!
Christopher Nolan and others Tarantino have a budget of millions for their movies, they can afford to shoot in 70mm, most of filmmakers and video producers can't afford to shoot in such format.
@@KathyXie Not really the point I was trying to make but since you wanna bring it there, alright. Shooting on film can actually be affordable depending on your budget and timeframe. Also, shooting film doesn't necessarily mean shooting 70mm. 16mm is far more affordable and available for smaller scale productions. Just this past summer I shot eight rolls of black and white 16mm and processed them by hand for an experimental film. Grant Singer used 16mm Kodak film stocks for the "Green Light" and "My My My" videos. And even if that wasn't happening, that doesn't change the fact that major filmmakers with deep pockets ARE still coughing up big bucks to shoot on 35mm and even 70mm. So there's still money to be made, and thus still a living, breathing market. And with the rising interest in analog photography amongst young people, it's likely we'll see Kodak continue to survive for at least a little while. Even in small batches, there is demand for film, a growing demand, in fact. But in directly answer to your question, shooting on film can be affordable. It's certainly not the most affordable option, but it's cheaper than long term renting an Arri or a Red. And the distinguishing aesthetic factor is a worthy value.
John Kenneth Huszagh
LOL
And some people love vinyl records as well. None of this detract from the fact that if they had kept with the times the phrase "Is a Kodak moment" would not have been relegated to history.
@@RoyCyberPunk Also not my point.... My point is simply that they still provide a product for a market which still has demand. And even better, growing demand, meaning that Kodak, which has scaled down its operations, will continue to operate to meet these demands through both producing motion picture film and photo film, as well as other products and services.
John Kenneth Huszagh
Is still a niche market just like vinil records and plain vanilla wristwatches. The video is 100% accurate in the fact that Kodak lost its position on the industry because of their lack of vision which sucks to tell you the truth. We are entering a stagnation period when it comes to this type of products. Apple has virtually stopped innovating since Jobs died cellphones look the exact same they did 10 years ago. And the Bluetooth wristwatches leave so much to be desired is not even funny. I hope that Kodak gets it's chuzpah back but as long as they just catter to a niche market and not innovate that's not happening same with watchmakers like Seiko, Bullova I would love for them to design the ultimate Bluetooth wristwatches and start the age of wristwatches again.
My Dad worked for Kodak -- when he and others suggested video tape many years before it was commercial, he and the others were threatened in a personal letter from the CEO himself. -- "We are a sensitized film company -- not an electronics company" .
Kodak had a succession of incompetent CEO's that eventually killed the company.
"you have to adapt even if that means competing with yourself." I wonder if that also applies at a personal level.
You didn't mention when Kodak went into instant photography market and stole Polaroid system, for which in 1990 had to paid Polaroid $925 millions after a 15 years lawsuit.
Same attitude held sway in the Xerox boardroom when their PARC facilities were told their computer innovations were never going to replace paper and GUI, the mouse and the intranet were allowed to be given to Jobs and his engineers at Apple.
You do not give Kodak enough credit. The Kodak DCS system was the first commercially available DSLR and was ahead of its time. The system was geared toward photojournalism and was not "middle of the pack".
The digital camera market in 1991 was not "getting crowded." (Were you even born then?)
Kodak did establish themselves early. Unfortunately, they didn't capitalize on their early lead.
Kodak's early professional digital cameras were built with Nikon bodies. Why? Because Kodak hadn't been the choice of pro photographers for a long time. Nikon and Canon were. Had Kodak kept up with their Retina SLR product line they would've been able to make their early pro digital SLRs on Kodak bodies, they could've had Kodak film SLRs sharing the pro market with Nikon and Canon.
Kodak had been marketing to the consumer market, even making a 126 SLR that used Retina lenses, though the body didn't support all the features of some of the lenses. Then there were the times Kodak made instant cameras and somehow Polaroid was able to successfully sue to stop them, even after the patents on instant photography had expired.
@@droopy_eyes You are confusing cell phones and cameras. Digital cameras basically appeared around 1999 as a significant force (13% of the market). By 2000 they were in the 2-3 megapixel range. In 2003 they outsold film cameras (73% share). Camera phones really appeared around 2004, first at very low resolution but by 2005-06 they were at two megapixels. 2006-09 smart phones and digital cameras matched in sales in Finland, then smart phones really took off increasing sales 4 fold in 4 years. Camera sales dropped by about half and continued to decline.
For those of us old enough to be around then - and actually experience it, I disagree with this highly inaccurate millenial lense. The market was FAR from crowded in 1991 - unless you wanted to own a digital camera instead of a car. The DCS was the standard by the mid 90's - An actual portable DSLR that you could print from... how novel. I remember watching how Kodak died a death of a thousand cuts, it wasn't a SINGULAR THING that killed the company. Kodak drowned on all its fronts due to mismanagement. So apparent in the 2000s if you dealt with them. Left hand didn't know what the right was doing. So what mistakes did Nikon and Canon make - to put themselves in a pickle today? They didn't make cell phones, or develop an operating system?
@@RockwoodJoe I'm as old as you, and I disagree with your disagreement. This video is spot on. Kodak's larger joust was to "guide" the market, not to "serve" the market. Their collapse was due to an inherent arrogance that they knew better than *_we_* did what *_we_* wanted. Their fingers were in their ears all the way down the toilet.
I didn't know that they'd actually squelched this insane opportunity in 1976, but now knowing, everything makes sense. Astounding arrogance, fate fully deserved.
@@MultiCappie You make it sound as if Kodak acted as a "single" entity in their arrogance and decision making. They were huge, disjointed and, just like GM did (or still is) lacked any focus, other than being told from the top to be "profitable". Every business unit pushed forward in its own vision ignoring the future because they had to. Having owned three early DCS bodies, I can honestly say Kodak was leaps and bounds ahead of the competition for digital imaging. Did they squander it? Hell yeah!
I was a U.S.N. photographer in the late '70's to the early '80's. I just want to say, "come back, Kodak"!
No more discoveries of a shoebox filled with old photos taken by previous generations of your family.
Just some old internal/external drive that has become obsolete or unreadable.
I’m glad someone’s mentioned this ‘elephant in the room’, paper photos have a level of ‘permanency’ and can immediately be seen/viewed, they can also be put in a frame for keeping around your house, I know you can get ‘digital frames’ but once again they have no level of ‘permanency’ because the pictures aren’t physically‘real’
Digital photos can still be printed out on a computer printer. Mall order catalogs still exist for people that don't think the internet is safe.
hydrolito I take your point, but how many people bother to print out there photos, percentage wise I don’t think it will be many
And then that box gets damaged by water or fire or gets lost and youre left with nothing.
@@treehavn or the hard drive or computer that the photos are stored on suddenly becomes corrupt and unreadable
I know someone who worked for Kodak/digital photography (once the company actually entered that market). He tells us that the employees from "the chemical side" would barely speak to the digital photography employees, because "That's not photography."
That's about the size of what really happened. The reasons are even sadder. Managers were fighting for prestigious offices and worrying about interoffice rivalries rather than running the company. The top managers wanted a cushy job where they didn't have to think or make decisions. They wanted to ride on what had been done by past generations. Kodak died from the top, while they still had some of the finest Engineers I've ever known.
I was around then, it was sheer mismanagement that killed Kodak. They died a death of a thousand cuts. There was no vision or even a real mission, it was purely about shareholder value.
How do you get access to all of this old archival footage? And why do I recognize most of your music from I Hate Everything? Is it some sort of stock music pack I'm not familiar with?
hope this happen to Jet ink makers....
I doubt it, jet ink has solved the problem by going with external tanks, the so called "supertanks" rather than cartridges and seeling bottles of dirty cheap ink.
I'm from Mexico and a bottle of Epson 100ml of ink costs me 70MXN or 3.3 USD and literally last almost a year. There is no other printing tech that is that as affordable, laser is just too expensive in comparison with that dirty cheap ink, at least in my country.
Yeah, why do I need cyan to print something In black and white
@@carlosdgutierrez6570 it's true but maybe someone could come up with a more convenient solution. Technology embrace by masses, most of the time, is based on conveniency and not only cost. The smartphones were heck a lot costly and had poor quality in comparisson to cameras back then but look at them now, commanding the market worldwide.
Went to photo school in LA years ago when film and transparencies ruled. I used to have my own darkroom at home, however, the chemicals used for developing film and printing were hazardous many people 'developing' dermatitis. Glad I switched to Photoshop. I scan many of my old film images and do not miss the 'old school' methods one bit.
Jesus. So early.
Love your channel!
I lived in RochesterNY when I was a boy. I swear half my relatives worked for Eastman Kodak. I remember there was one day a year Kodak used to rent some big amusement park and only employees and their families were allowed in. My uncle would take me and say I was one of his kids lol. I actually miss “real” photos. They were special. You didn’t waste film on ordinary things. Probably because both the film and the printing was so expensive. Today I use my iPhone for most pictures but still use a “real” camera for truly special pictures.
I'm a student at Rochester Institute of Technology, or RIT (NOT to be confused with RPI where Steven Sasson graduated, although my brother will be graduating from there) and we have a lot of professors who used to work at Kodak. What's interesting is that Kodak also invented OLED displays. Although I guess they sold this technology to Samsung and LG, which may have been yet another missed opportunity.
Wow, OLED are very in demand now.
Well, no if kodak don't sell it we still stuck with big tv. Best for that company to been gone. Don't seee to do anything rights.
@@campkira They licensed the patents for alot of things, even to this day. Chapter 11 is not liquidation
I worked for Kodak from 1998 to 2004. The reason Kodak shelved the digital camera is mainly because they produced a 36 exposure roll of film for about $0.25 and sold it for $12.00 and people had to pay another $10 to Kodak for developing. Film was a cash cow. It had little to do with the customer desire to have prints. They were addicted to the profit margin and had staid old men leading the company at the time of the market transformation.
"You have to adapt even if that means competing with yourself."
It's so easy to sit here and judge Kodak, but what are we clinging onto in our lives, that once worked but is now slowly turning into our demise?
Amish still use horses and buggies and are still around. Although some women are getting jobs in offices as farmland is becoming more expensive. They only go to 8th grade of school.
I and the 10s of thousands of ex Kodak employees would tell you-you're partially correct. Kodak’s profits were always as a consumables company. Their hardware was break even at best. Though the world's largest imaging company, they were, in reality, a Chemical company, whose primary products were in imaging. Though digital photography has resulted in an explosion in the numbers of photos and videos taken, historians lament the passing of physical photos, as most people today are very lackadaisical in archiving their photos, let alone making Back-ups or actual hard copies using traditional silver-halide based prints. Kodak's core competency chemical technology spun-off as their Eastman Chemicals division in the mid-90s and they remain a market leader today, having brought to market Cyanoacrylate adhesives (super-glue), PTFE - Polyethylene Terephthalate, the clear now ubiquitous plastic used for soda and water bottles, and Kodel Polyester, famously used in the static-shock inducing carpets of the '60s and '70s. In short a technological powerhouse that fell victim to complacency.
Kodak just couldn't grasp the power of the all mighty "Home nudes"...The Sony digital Mavica did.
I suspected Kodak was dead the minute I saw the first ad for the digital Mavica. I wanted a computer which could digitize, store and manipulate old photos, but the package wasn't available at a price the consumer could afford in the early 1980's, when I was running a B&W photo lab in Seattle.
@@MalcolmBrenner Digital Mavicas appeared only in the late 90s. Analog Mavicas were introduced 1981-1992. Digital Mavicas 1997-2003.
@@okaro6595 You are wise, Mr. X! I stand humbly corrected: the first Mavicas WERE analog.
I remember we had a digital camera at school back in the 80s. It only took B&W so to get color, you had to take 3 seperate photos with color wheels, then combine in the software. It was used mostly for converting existing photos into digital
Plenty of people including myself still love physical prints. There's something nice about flipping through a physical photo album.
As a person in their early 30s I plan on printing out a bunch of photos to hang on my walls. Just gotta get around to finding a quality place to do that...
I still love my physical items. I even prefer CDs over digital music. It's just feels good knowing that it's all mine and won't disappear into cyberspace. Maybe I'm old.
@@WouldntULikeToKnow. to each their own. Sure, you can be exotic and nostalgic, but that's still not enough to make a come back.
My first digital camera was a Kodak. It doesn't take very good pictures although I still use it from time to time. It has a little bit better picture quality when compared to my cell phone,
Kodak was never gonna last. They weren’t a camera company. They were a film company. Sure they could’ve shifted but that would require so many changes
It’s like people thinking Walmart should’ve been amazon. It’s hard to do something like that
*Sears should have been amazon
@@J-1410 I was about to comment that 😂
My dad worked for Kodak for 20 years in the govt projects division. Time and again he'd say how upper management ineptitude sunk the company. They had a lot of patents that could have made them money but they squandered it all away.
Not sure I agree with your analysis. Even at their peak, wasn't the majority of revenue in the actual FILM, not the camera sales? People had Kodak cameras, and they may have been the most popular, but they also bought other brands. But the Kodak film fit in all the brands, and that was their major revenue stream. You sold a camera once, but sold lots of film for it...
I can't imagine that even 50 percent of the 2018 digital camera market comes close in sales revenue (adjusted for inflation) that film sales did. For sure, no company is climbing the top 50 list on camera sales. Sony makes digital cameras sure... but they also make a TON of other stuff like TVs, the playstation, etc etc etc.
No matter what, the company was headed for a huge fall once the digital age came into effect. Without film sales, no realistic amount of camera sales was going to keep the company on the top list of large companies or generate that kind of revenue.
Yep, This is why Kodak left the higher end of the camera trade in the 1960s, It was the FILM and PAPER that made the money. None of the most famous high end camera companies (Nikon, Pentax, Canon) were as large as Kodak as a company. One may have bought a camera once a decade, but they might buy film monthly or more. Consumer grade cameras were enough for Kodak to sell, and if people want to use Kodak film in a non Kodak camera, Good! I'm sure that Sony didn't mind me using a Sony tape in my JVC vcr, Sony still got some money from me.
The profits from film simply went away, they didn't move over to a new medium. They had set themselves up to be the kings of the consumer film market. They lasted over a century and the market eventually changed. In the history of corporations, their overall success is probably up there with just about anybody. 50 years from now, I bet most of the companies we think are "too big to fail" will be gone. Things could be way different in even 10 to 20 years.
Same with ink jet printers, they give them away so you buy the expensive ink.
As an amateur (and occasional professional) photographer, I'd speculated about the gradual demise of Kodak for more than a decade. This video confirms that my partially educated guesses were spot-on. After having owned & used a Canon 5D, I was lent a Kodak 14 mp digital camera to use on a job several years ago; as I expected, it was a piece of crap! The image was noisy and irreparably way off on color.
Several reputable camera-makers had already pushed the technological envelope quite far before Kodak even began thinking that the quality of digitizing the images was the most important factor to the photographic market. I remember being one of the first to use digital cameras in the '90's, thinking that the absence of Kodak there was likely a mistake made by fossilized management enamored with the old technology they thought would survive!
Business emulates nature, where any species must change or perish as the environment changes.
Like George Eastman, they assumed their 'work was done', committing suicide without waiting... until it was too late.
There is a whole new generation that lost interest in digital cameras, because their smartphones are good enough for social media.
On the other hand, things like instax, 35mm film and vintage cameras really grabs their attention.
Hope Kodak adapts, stays true to their origins, and keeps providing their products to young artists and creatives.
Young people run my local lab, that now develops a few hundred rolls a day and is dedicated to film only.
Your local lab is out of touch with time.
@@trollbreeder2534 as an exotic stuff, that's fine. But it wouldn't return as a mass industry.
Reminds me of how Xerox perfected the graphical user interface, but the higher-ups couldn't see how it fit into their business model. They let Steve Jobs look at it, and now people think Apple invented it. A similar thing happened with IBM and personal computers: IBM was trying to protect their mainframe business, so didn't innovate, and was expensive.
History repeats itself.
With the same ideology, is Apple doing the same mistakes?
From the looks of it, yeah.
Maybe, Apple was a computer and software company. Now it's a phone manufacturer that makes computers and tablets on the side. There is nothing wrong with being a phone manufacturer, but there are many others producing similar specification phones for less money.
Microsoft missed smartphones.
@@jamesslick4790 thing is, their iPhone sales are starting to slump, and in some international markets (China specifically) their sales are starting to slump hard, and I don't recall Apple doing anything actually innovative in the last decade tbh, all they did was make consumers mad by removing the 3.5mm jack, literally everyone I see with those iPhones always use the adapter (sole exception to my stepfather who only uses it to call/text, we got it free as part of some deal with the phone company)
@@cpufreak101 We are in agreement, Apple put too many eggs in the iPhone basket, And the iPhone isn't spectacularly superior to other phone makers flagship models despite costing more (spec for spec) AND having customer unfriendly dis advantages like no 3.5mm audio jack, No Expandable storage and no user replaceable battery. (LOL, My cheapo LG Arista 2 has all three!). Meanwhile long time Mac users are pissed that no. real attention has been paid to higher end Mac computers. Apple Used to innovate, Now it's just a "name" that like "designer jeans" offer no real advantages over other brands besides repeat customers used to the OS.
5:47 i am one of the people that want hard copies of my photos, its one reason im into film, house fires happen less than hard drive failures.
Keep them on a flash stick put away with your passport and Birth certificate.
@@Crashed131963 flash sticks fail the most often, i cannot tell you how many times I have had an sd card or flash drive die on me. It's way safer to keep them on a hard drive over a flash drive, or even better keep my film with my passport and BC and then reprint them if in the rare case my house burns down.
3:23 wtf was Canon thinking? _”We make a digital camera, but we make it look like a fish !!”_
That was some concept, not an actual product.
I loved working at Kodak Australia. I remember at a film launch the Kodak speaker spoke briefly about digital cameras. In his words, don't be scared of digital cameras they will never replace film. 2 years later all our Kodak owned stores were closed.
Blockbuster: "Hi, Kodak. Welcome to the 'I'm an Idiot Support Group'."
GM has entered the chat
Kodak were patent trolls and had all their patents tied up in emulsion and chemistry, allowing global dominance in motion picture and manufacture under license. Edison and Kodak had too many patents, which drove a considerable backlash and established Hollywood, far from operations in New York. Digital wasn't seen as a threat because the resolution of a CCD array could never approach the molecular structure of film (a single 8x10" transparency rates at 4640 megapixels). What they didn't see coming were DSP algorithms, the software that makes awful pictures look okay. Digital didn't sink Kodak, they still dominated motion picture even after camera manufacturers moved to digital -- what sank them, and Leica, Pentax, Contax, Ilford, Fuji, Polaroid etc. etc... was the cameraphone. Once that tech hit the big screen, Kodak and their patents no longer mattered.
There is a Kodak factory in Southern Oregon that produces the “film” for x-ray machines. I believe it’s in White City. Quite a few people work there.
I worked for Kodak for over 25 years.While I was there, we saw one bad CEO after another. Add to that a never ending supply of worthless, lazy do nothing middle managers.It was a sinking ship for many years.To bad because it really was a great company at one time.I was proud to tell people I worked for Eastman Kodak.
" You have to adapt, even if that means competing with yourselves "
- Lesson.👍
“My work is done, why wait” my teachers bout to flip when they hear my new favorite quote
Well guess what? I'd love to be able to print my photos again. Having a physical copy of the moments I love the most beats having then be lost on a phone that runs out of space. Or have the phone currupt or lose the images if my phone decides to be stupid. Print stores charge too much and it would be nice to print from the comfort of my home.
I mean...you can
This is one of the better cheddar videos in a long time
2:00 The third Paul brother. Very ironic.
Interesting, in the early nineties I used to call on Kodak in Hemel Hempstead UK as an airline sales representative. I broached the subject of how the future was in digital, and they just sort of laughed, saying pros would never go digital. Not the only time this sort of thing has happened, I was chatting with Manfred Mann over a cup of tea about tech a few years later, he had just bought a serous SSL mixing desk for a shed load of money, and at the same time Yamaha had released their Promix-01, an automated digital desk which when connected to a 1Gb external hard drive and a 486 PC became an audio recording station. I said , with the advent of the Yamaha desk, kids would be making serious music in their back bedrooms. Manfred said there would always be a need for studios. Both of us were right.
Here from TechAltar, just watched this video and saw enough: instant subscribe!
I love this kind of content, keep up your great work
It makes you think, how many other innovations have been repressed by giant corporations, but weren’t able to get to market through other means...
Ooo boi.... I remember those Kodak Camera's .... God... Those old Memories!😋
In the autumn/winter of 1977, Kodak began marketing it's foray into the instant film camera: The Kodamatic. I remember it well because my father & I had our picture taken before a large promotional banner for it at our local K-Mart. My mom was so impressed with the color rendering, she insisted my dad one of the models offered. It served us well... until film got scarce. And by then, I had my camera: A Kodak Disc.
I visited Rochester, NY, the HQ of Kodak, around 1999. Fuji film was "the enemy". -- you couldn't buy a roll of Fuji film in any store there.
But the real enemy was the management who refused to fully embrace digital photography and made bad blunders.
Film gave them a constant income stream. However, digital photography is like a hardware company -- you only make money on new products releases, not on consumables, i.e. film.
Kodak thought at-home digital printing would be the digital equivalent income stream, but they were wrong.
Kodak really needed to embrace a completely different business model and redesign their entire R&D efforts on a hardware-centric model.
Poor Rochester -- Kodak and Xerox are a shell of their former self.
I remember being in Rochester around 2012 (and I think it was just a week or 2 before Kodak went bankrupt) the three things I remember was just how "dirty" the whole place was becoming, how dead and empty the Kodak buildings seemed, and my stepfather running a red light :/
I grew up in Rochester, It's sad to see what a rotted ghetto it has turned into. Thanks Kodak, George Eastman is turning in his grave.
I worked in the photo business from 1971 through 1990. Kodak could never figure out what business they wanted to be in. They didn't recognize they were in the IMAGING business and not just the film and paper business. They would dabble in a market segment, spend a lot of money, and then exit. As an example, in the early 1980's Kodak decided they wanted to be in the video business so they outsourced building Kodak consumer video cameras to several Japanese manufacturers - and didn't sell very many Kodak video cameras, so they dropped that line of equipment. Then they got into video tape, built an entirely new factory and made, probably, the best video tape on the market. We had dropout logging equipment and when we compared Sony tape, Fuji tape, and Kodak tape, the Kodak has the least amount of dropouts and the highest quality cassettes for U-matic tape (3/4-inch). The Kodak 1-inch tape was in high demand by professionals and television stations because of the quality - but, in reality that's a small market. Within three years they were out of the tape business. Then they repeated the same thing with floppy disks, and CD's. You could go on and on about the market entrances, and exits - there were many - all the time ignoring electronic imaging of all types. I loved Kodak products. They were always the highest quality as Kodak quality control was the best in the world. Unfortunately, their business acumen within the imaging market was not the equal of their quality control.
Kodak is also a massive laboratory and industrial chemical manufacturer
Eastman Chemical, you mean
This has lessons for politics as well. We can either look to the future and be willing to change and adapt, or we can try to hopelessly hold on to the past and false notions of past greatness.
Netflix knows this well, they destroyed their own DVD mailing business by popularizing streaming
Amazon started out selling books now they make a tablet which can use to read digital books, hard copy books can still be ordered though.
It's also important to note that Kodak ignored the feedback offerred by Faith Popcorn Brain Reserve (FPBR), a trend forecasting company which came to the conclusion in the late 80s that the future of film was digital. Kodak was unwilling to accept her teams conclusion and fired them. Rest is history.
History repeat itself
I'm looking at you *APPLE*
why does this keep happening? every industry giant that has ever died always died for not adapting
blockbuster also died because they thought people actually cared about buying dvds and not just viewing the movies and refused to adapt
Gordon Ramsay: YOU ARE IN DENIAL!
6:55 this final note rings the most true to me, it's such a compelling fact.
Yes, it was a mistake but something must be said too. There is a little context understandably left out of this narrative because on nowadays’ perspective it seems so obvious (a kind of a Captain Hindsight issue here).
People on those days did want to have “something palpable” whether to see or to store their photos, computers back then not only weren’t that common as to think that every house had at least some device that could act as one (as phone that nowadays is a de facto little computer) and those PC that existed were slow, not that easy to use, had specific software that had to be acquired (not downloaded) that were very specific for whatever brand that they were intended for, a PC could break (and people may not had been fond or knowledgeable of the VERY SLOW process of continuously backing up their stuff) and Internet (when it began) was not the big compendium of “everything you want to know with just two clicks away” that is today). There wasn’t “a cloud” either. Digital technology, in context, was a kind of a fancy, very ugly LOW RESOLUTION, clumsy, complex new technology that few take seriously and it was (comparatively) VERY EXPENSIVE too. It also meant that it was very easy to lose whatever that you recorded. Printing or storing in some recording palpable device wasn’t an old man’s attempt to avoid the passing of time but the logical bridge from the old to the new until people felt safe (and all the problems I mentioned became inexistent or irrelevant).
@@shiwomino5775 well, we are living in an age where the tech revolution is going so fast.
It took is thousands of years to innovate from the chariot and carriage to the first internal combustion automobiles, but it took us more than a century to go from those cars to the creation of electric cars.
It took us 60 years from inventing aeroplanes to going to the moon.
It took us 40-50 years from the giant WW2 computers to the internet.
It took us about 40 years from Marie Curie getting the Nobel Price in Physics for discovering radioactivity to the Manhattan Project and the first atom bombs.
It took us less than 40 years from the world's first "brick" cell phone to the iPhone that has touch screen tech and internet capabilities.
It's hard to guess what's the next big thing would be, but given that despite poor resolutions and storage capabilities back then, almost about everyone is ready to welcome the digital age.
Fascinating that the first Sony Mavica looks pretty much exactly like a modern mirrorless camera, yet most other early digital cameras that followed it ended up going for a radically different design, some looking more like binoculars than cameras.
That was not a digital camera. It was a still video camera. You could view the images on TV.
This video draws some pretty misleading conclusions. The digital camera revolution didn't kill Kodak, the smartphone revolution did, just as it also killed the the rest of the consumer digital camera market (and is now whittling away at the bottom of the enthusiast digital camera market). Kodak was a market leader through the early digital camera revolution, unfortunately their only other significant investments were in physical image reproduction (professional and consumer printing), and digital publishing and distribution killed that right about the same time as smartphones killed their consumer imaging investments. Kodak had no significant electronics manufacturing base to continue producing digital cameras at cutthroat margins, and by the time the threat of smartphones was apparent, Apple and Samsung were unassailable. On top of it all, they had significant pension obligations to continue funding through and after the 2008 recession, so they had little latitude to just burn their product portfolio down and start over. Sometimes history just picks winners and losers, and this time Kodak was the loser, even though they made the right moves at the right time.
Tell that to Canon, Nikon, Sony, and Fujifilm. Their DSLR and mirrorless digital cameras are THRIVING!!! Kodak didn't even budge.
@@MrQwertypoiuyty More ILCs are sold annually than in any year in the film era.
@@MrQwertypoiuyty Kodak had no real professional DSLR presence because the industry was nearly standardized around Canon and Nikon (Kodak's DSLRs were even just Kodak sensors in Nikon bodies), the consumer digital market was their only growth path in digital imaging. But the death of the consumer digicam market is what killed them. Even for the companies you listed, the future isn't great. Mirrorless is killing DSLR. Premium phones are attacking the prosumer digital camera market now. Canon makes far more money from medical imaging and Business document reproduction services these days than they do digital cameras, it's completely arguable that they're not even a camera company any longer. There's other camera companies that made the jump to digital to only to fall on hard times: Konica-Minolta (sold the camera division to Sony), Pentax (got absorbed first by Hoya then sold to Ricoh), Hasselblad (owned by by a private equity firm now, with minority ownership by DJI). The four you listed + Panasonic can afford to stay in the game because they're well diversified and don't depend solely on digital cameras.
@@jasonosmond6896 how bout you make a video then.
Jason Osmond, you dumbazz. Digital camera did kill kodak in the early 2000s. When i saw a digital camera for the first time in 2002, i loved it at first sight. You can take as many photos as you like without worrying about film and can review them instantly. Smartphone cameras gotten better in 2010, that was 10 years later while kodak was already dying from digital cameras. Kodak should have released their digital camera first, evolve it and keep up the creativity for it. They didn't do that wanted to milk their films as much as they can until the day no one cared about it anymore.
Montgomery Wards, Kodak, Sears, all were once brands on-par with Costco, Apple and Amazon. When I was a kid, the thought of those institutions disappearing would have been a laughable and frightening thought, but now they are either dead or on the verge. Let it be a lesson to Costco, Apple and Amazon!
Love this vid in particular. So detailed and interesting.
It's like who dares wins. Kodak unfortunately didn't "dare" to step up from a chemical-paper etc company to become a creator of an innovation that would change the photography world forever
I worked as beta tester for the Kodak digital event photography system in 1998. They knew the shift to Digital would DESTROY the market for proper Photography. And it did.
How so? I'm honestly curious.
FUN FACT: Kodak also invented the white OLED back in the 1970s, which is currently used by LG to make their industry-leading OLED TVs. Kodak sat on the patent for this white OLED for years, before selling it to LG who brought it to market - where they currently dominate every other company producing OLED TVs.
The white OLED technology is critical to allowing LG to dominate, because having a white OLED with a color filter placed on top of it allows a much higher yield (fewer manufacturing defects) and reduces pixel count by using a single OLED vs using 4 RGB OLEDs to make each pixel in a standard RGB-style OLED display.
The white OLED also mostly eliminates much of the "burn in" effect that some colored OLED panels suffer from, where one "sub pixel" (one of the RGB OLEDs) starts to become dimmer than the others after some extended use, causing a permanent change in that pixel that leaves a 'ghost' image in some areas of the screen where static content is displayed.
That is not true, it's a myth they ignored it. First commercial digital cameras with good quality were kodak and they keep doing for a while. I bought myself one around 2000 and was a good camera. The problem is that Kodak was never a high end camera manufacturer, only point a click and a bit better than that. It never tried to access to the SLR market because they had no experience on it. As a point a click camera they had no way to compete with Canon, Nikon etc doing similar products and in addition of the that DSLR.
If the idea is that they ignored it before then 2000 and did little with the patents, perhaps. But digital cameras before that time were expensive toys very far of the film cameras. There was no market there. We need to remember that even a expensive Canon DSLR from 2003 had a lot less quality than a current phone, imagine 5 years before.
Kodak was mainly a film and point a click industry, being the film more important. Film disappears and point and click becomes too competitive for a brand without tradition of high quality cameras.
Punto Devista They did brand/market a Nikon D100 as their own or something close to it.
@@Texeyevideo they aparently did also dslr:
Kodak DCS Pro 14n
It was not based in Nikon, it was very superior to the D100 as it was a full sensor 35mm camera when Nikon was cropped (4533 x 3022 versus 3029 x 1980 Nikon)
You know that you just reinforced the point of the video right??
@@karlpj1 But it had a horrible sensor that couldn't be used above ISO 80, and even at the base ISO any underexposure resulted in virtually uncorrectable amounts of noise. I know because I briefly owned one and it's successor the DSLR/N