As a Rochester native and a son and grandson of Kodak employees, this article hits pretty close to home. Unfortunately I'm too young to remember the Kodak my grandfather worked for. My grandmother bought 10 shares of Kodak stock for me when I was born as an investment for my college account. With all of that in mind my optimism may be naive.
In my opinion, if their patents are not enough to save the company, they at least have kept around many of the right employees to move forward in a digital internet enabled society. They are starting to make a platform for turning digital images into physical prints. Every Target and many CVS stores have Kodak printing kiosks which allow you to print straight from facebook and film. They just released a facebook app for making prints and photobooks. They may not have film and they may not have the its popular digital cameras, but they have the best platform for making prints hands down.
But the amount of photos that get printed are small, very small. Is it enough to save the company, without patents, without cameras?
I only have 1 traditionally printed picture, framed and sitting on my desk. I only have it because it was a gift. (I pulled off the back of it, it was printed on, you guessed it, Fijifilm)
The other pictures I have are done in a less traditional manner. I've had a few done by Fracture, which people have loved (of which, ironically, I personally own none). No film involved.
Can Kodak survive? I think so, but they won't be anything like the Kodak my parents or I grew up with, and only if they get out of the camera (and possibly home printer) markets.
Is that also a matter of marketing? I love printed photos, and have recently starting printing photos books - amazing christmas presents for a start. I grew up looking through our family albums and I want my kids to have the same experience. It may be that there is a renaissance in the printed photo yet to come, and I'd trust Kodak for the technology of that if they could figure out how to fuel a boom.
You bring up a very good point, one that I didn't even consider. I, also, would want my children to have similar experiences as me, it terrifies me slightly to think of how different things could/will be.
I still think that puts Kodak outside the realm of cameras and printers, but could possibly reinvent themselves to that market.
Last December my mother purchased a Kodak slide projector for my grandfather. We set it up and projected some of the 17 carousels, and clicked through them, as he and my mother would tell stories relating to them. It was a wholesome family experience, and we would probably not all crowd around a computer screen to do something similar in iPhoto.
[Note to Kodak: Ignore my earlier statement about getting out of the camera/printer market and do a couple production runs of slide projectors… we've now gone through two of them because they're just so old!]
My local supermarkets used to have those Kodak kiosks in the place they used to have 1-hour developing (a decade ago). Last year, they tore out the kiosks to replace them with DVDs and magazine racks.
My local camera store tried to manage the transition to digital, but couldn't hold on. They finally went out of business a year ago, and the building torn down. In its place is a new bank.
If I was on the Kodak board then right now I would use every single penny I have to buy Lytro's light field technology. I would then use all of the work that Kodak has ever done in optics and cameras to increase the resolution, decrease the size and make light field a part of the camera. That is one thing an iPhone can't and won't do for the foreseeable future.
I would then leverage Kodak's knowledge of chemical printing to push lenticular printing forward and tie it in with a light field camera. I would push things out with aggressive marketing. I would make it fashionable to shoot your lover with that camera. ("Capture your Kodak moment like never before") After launch if the services idea picks off and Kodak's lenticular printing facilities start humming then I would lower the Lytro camera's profit margin and make it mainstream.
The second thing I would get into is making book/poster publishing a commodity and create an on demand publishing system using Kodak's expertise. I would tie in with Amazon et al and make it better, cheaper than doing mass runs the way we do today. It will be challenging, but it is achievable.
The third path I would pursue if I was serving on that board is to use old printing technology to improve 3D printing. I would ask the question, is there a way to focus a beam of light and locally catalyze a reaction so that a crystal can be created layer by layer? If not then is there a way to do something equivalent to this? The answers to these questions might very well be Kodak's long term future.
Sadly I think those things will never happen at Kodak. It is an old, fossilized company and you want it to operate like a start-up. This kind of maneuvering for them is like trying to turn an oil tanker in a tight radius.
>>>It is an old, fossilized company and you want it to operate like a start-up.<<<
They better.
The livelihood of 18,800 human beings is on the line. If they fail then the lives of nearly 18,800 families will be torn apart. Failure shouldn't be an option, let alone a strategy.
Have you ever been to Rochester? Kodak has been doing layoffs for decades. Its not like there are 18,800 jobs waiting to be taken there. Especially for image scientists.
I guess they'll have to learn skills that are useful outside of Kodak. If they never did so in their whole life, they never had a career in the first place, just a dependence.
Lytro's light field is a bullshit product that very few photographers and even fewer consumers will actually give a shit about. Nikon, Canon, etc. have made far more significant advances in the last five years than Lytro. Here is a short list of reasons why Lytro's product is just a big ball of hype:
1) Horrible low light performance from the sensor, which they have deflected by talking up the relatively large aperture of their lens, which is not really even that impressive (f/0.95 would be impressive, maybe even an f/1.4, but f/2? go buy a Panasonic LX5, it blows the Lytro out of the water).
2) No one cares about adjusting focus after the fact, get it right the first time, or don't bother. Even when you can adjust the focus, 99.9% of the time, that feature is only useful for macro photography, which is generally tightly controlled and reproducible at the time of exposure
3) The resolution sucks.
4) The form factor is way too big for a supposedly revolutionary product
5) There is no convenient way to share your photos directly from the device
6) Slow frame rate (again, even the lowly and well aged LX5, which you can buy for around $270 on Amazon right now, blows it out of the water)
7) The UI sucks. They're going for Apple level quality there, but they're a bunch of third rate amateurs.
8) Only hobbyists and pros want to fiddle with an image after it's taken, your average Joe just wants it to look great the second they take it. What's better, red eye reduction in some software on your computer or red eye reduction in the camera?
You know who gives a shit about Lytro? Gadget bloggers do, because it's something new. That's it. The technology is hardly revolutionary. Due to the small sensor size in what they're offering, it's pretty hard to even tell you've shifted focus in anything other than a macro shot. Go look at this example:
This is one of the very few honest examples in their gallery. You can barely detect the focus shift because the depth of field is pretty high already, which is commonly the case with the cameras average users have embraced (wide angle lenses and a small aperture mean that almost any cell phone will guarantee that everything is in focus in a daylight pic). Furthermore, for the vast majority of photography there are not multiple points that should be in focus. 99% of the time, you either want everything in focus or only one thing in focus. Look at this example:
Why would I want only one in focus?? So my gadget blogging buddies can fiddle fuck around with it using some proprietary widget on some website? Jesus.
Lightfield's everything in focus tech comes at a cost that is far, far too high. None of Kodak's expertise can correct for that, because it is basically a question of processing power and what the sensor is optimized for. What do you want? High resolution? Great low light sensitivity? Super high frame rates? Selective focus in editing? Super long battery life? You can't have them all. Consumers won't care about it, pros don't care about it, and there will be a terrible, terrible bunch of reviews as soon as they get to market. I wish they were public so I could short them.
Lenticular printing?? Seriously? Hollywood and every TV manufacturer are slowly realizing (again, because they like to do this every 40 years or so) that almost no one cares about 3D TVs or programming. You want Kodak to go down that path in a format where it's not even as beneficial?
Printing 3D objects is something Kodak could go after, but do they have any expertise whatsoever in that field? Creating a truly revolutionary digital camera (e.g. something that captures things people actually care about, like crazy fast action at a kid's soccer game from 30 yards away like the new Nikon V1 can, and can be shared instantly) is another thing they should go af...
"Lytro's light field is a bullshit product that very few photographers and even fewer consumers will actually give a shit about."
You're underestimating how the technology can be used to simplify the process of taking an image for the average consumer. With the right marketing and UX Lytro could sell their camera as one that 'just works'.
No one wants to bother focusing an image. Everyone is disappointed when a photo comes out blurry. Yeah sure they could invest time into learning how to take better pictures but for a lot of people who just want nice pictures of their friends when they're on holiday/at a club/out for dinner, they don't want to waste their time doing that.
A camera where focusing an image is abstracted away so that the consumer doesn't have to think about it would be a huge step forward. (Think post-shot auto-focus with optional tweaking for when the camera doesn't get it right). Combine this with features already available such as automatic red-eye reduction and the barrier to entry for taking decent quality pictures is much lower. A lot of people would buy that camera.
Photos are usually blurry because the exposure time is long because light levels are low. Depth of field is very high on consumer cameras sofocussing is pretty much unnecessary.
> You're underestimating how the technology can be used to simplify the process of taking an image for the average consumer. With the right marketing and UX Lytro could sell their camera as one that 'just works'.
Simpler than having the camera embedded in your phone so you don't have to carry two devices just to take and send pictures?
Face it if you're a pro you'd carry an SLR and if you're not you'd probably just use your phone.
"A camera where focusing an image is abstracted away so that the consumer doesn't have to think about it would be a huge step forward. (Think post-shot auto-focus with optional tweaking for when the camera doesn't get it right). "
Almost every DSLR you can buy has already abstracted this away by coming up with really killer AF systems. Cheap consumer cameras and cell phone cameras have abstracted this away by always producing images with a super high depth of field. There is an inherent contradiction in what you're saying about the post-shot tweaking and user simplicity. The camera has to always get it right, there is no post-shot process for anyone other than photo hobbyists and professionals, who represent a small (though not insignificant) market.
I do agree that their technology could be slightly useful for that market, but unfortunately the major use case is when the camera has screwed up, and because of the nature of their technology, the images produced with it are of such mediocre quality that it's almost hard to tell the difference. Even in the macro shots on their demo gallery, the lens itself is so soft and the resolution off the sensor is so poor that shifting the focus isn't even all that rewarding most of the time.
The long and the short of it is that Lytro are not making the kind of camera you are talking about. Sony are with their NEX series. Panasonic are with their GF series. Nikon with the 1 series. The iPhone 4S camera totally destroys the Lytro for apparent image quality, low light performance, dynamic range, and then completlely annihilates them when it comes to actually doing something with your photos...
Lytro's camera is a graduate thesis that grew legs, went mad with delusions of grandeur and tried to con the whole world into thinking that its one basically irrelevant feature is actually revolutionary.
Gadget bloggers believed the hype because that's essentially what they're paid to do.
While I agree that Lytro is a gadget and it's not going very far, I strongly disagree with you here:
> 2) No one cares about adjusting focus after the fact, get it right the first time, or don't bother.
You could say the same about exposure, white balance and RAW files.
I'm still shooting film on a manual exposure and manual focus camera, so I know that those features are not strictly necessary, but they surely are convenient.
White balance and exposure definitely are useful settings for pros, but even for pros I don't see the post-process focus selection being all that useful, certainly not considering the tradeoffs they made.
Personally I shoot with just about everything. A big DSLR, my cellphone, compact digicams, film rangefinders with and without meters, film SLRs, giant medium format and large format cameras, etc. But I am a total freak in that regard. The things that I find enormously useful and fascinating are completely irrelevant to normal people. Unfortunately, normal people won't be fascinated with the Lytro either.
best part of your argument is that it's the exact same thing one would say back in the days of the first digital cameras (which had no benefit compared to any semi-pro or even point-and-shoot of the time)
The early digital cameras had some tremendous advantages even back when Kodak was just strapping digital backs on the rear of Nikon F3s. Those cameras were immediately adopted by photo-journalists. The Lytro tech is at best a mildly interesting feature that could have some use in the future, but their implementation of it sucks.
Except for delivering images to an editor seconds after they've been shot. Best case scenario for a photo-journalist using film back then would have been a couple of hours for an E6 run, even the very first Kodak DCS with its pcmcia storage cards could beat that.
true, ONE advantage. Except the image quality sucked so hard it was impossible to use these digitals on anything but smal pictures on black and white newspapers... for a good couple of years
"one killer feature", by the way, is which is what the lytro brings too: take a snap and adjust the focus along with your editor, which is an excelent feature for a photo-journalist. Take a snapshot of that occupy whatever street before u get pepper-sprayed, then adjust to the most dramatic face before putting it live. Awesome!
It could be awesome if they licensed the technology to someone else, but because of the way the tech works, you're going to inherently have lower resolution and (more importantly to photojournalists) bad low light performance. It reminds me of the tradeoffs that the Foveon sensor made. Insanely good high ISO performance (like you get with the D3S now even up to 128,000 ISO, and that could easily hit 512,000 in a couple of years) can actually obviate the need for this kind of focus adjustment because you can shoot at f/8 and get a high depth of field even in low light scenarios.
"if they licensed the technology to someone" => which leads us exactly to the point of this comment thread: Kodak buying them and using the tech as a big competitive advantage ;-)
Kodak is pretty much both feet in grave after they sold their image sensor business, which was probably the only competitive thing they have.
Now it's interesting what Leica would do after kodak sensors are gone.
Well, maybe their business solutions(printing, kiosks) can survive.
Very tough for Kodak to recover. What's amazing is how ahead of the game they were. Digital cameras in 1975. Fischer was also ahead of the game, and they scaled back because their short term earnings suffered. In a way they remind me of another aging Rochester company - Xerox.
Regarding other comments about the town... If you're a specialist in a small or medium sized city, and not willing to move, you are at risk. This is true if you are branding specialist in Cincinnati, a Russian literature specialist in Albuquerque, an also if you're an imaging specialist in Rochester. The idea that a company can protect you because it is large is obsolete. By encouraging that thinking, they are making their demise all the more likely.
28 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 73.3 ms ] threadIn my opinion, if their patents are not enough to save the company, they at least have kept around many of the right employees to move forward in a digital internet enabled society. They are starting to make a platform for turning digital images into physical prints. Every Target and many CVS stores have Kodak printing kiosks which allow you to print straight from facebook and film. They just released a facebook app for making prints and photobooks. They may not have film and they may not have the its popular digital cameras, but they have the best platform for making prints hands down.
I only have 1 traditionally printed picture, framed and sitting on my desk. I only have it because it was a gift. (I pulled off the back of it, it was printed on, you guessed it, Fijifilm)
The other pictures I have are done in a less traditional manner. I've had a few done by Fracture, which people have loved (of which, ironically, I personally own none). No film involved.
Can Kodak survive? I think so, but they won't be anything like the Kodak my parents or I grew up with, and only if they get out of the camera (and possibly home printer) markets.
I still think that puts Kodak outside the realm of cameras and printers, but could possibly reinvent themselves to that market.
Last December my mother purchased a Kodak slide projector for my grandfather. We set it up and projected some of the 17 carousels, and clicked through them, as he and my mother would tell stories relating to them. It was a wholesome family experience, and we would probably not all crowd around a computer screen to do something similar in iPhoto.
[Note to Kodak: Ignore my earlier statement about getting out of the camera/printer market and do a couple production runs of slide projectors… we've now gone through two of them because they're just so old!]
My local camera store tried to manage the transition to digital, but couldn't hold on. They finally went out of business a year ago, and the building torn down. In its place is a new bank.
I would then leverage Kodak's knowledge of chemical printing to push lenticular printing forward and tie it in with a light field camera. I would push things out with aggressive marketing. I would make it fashionable to shoot your lover with that camera. ("Capture your Kodak moment like never before") After launch if the services idea picks off and Kodak's lenticular printing facilities start humming then I would lower the Lytro camera's profit margin and make it mainstream.
The second thing I would get into is making book/poster publishing a commodity and create an on demand publishing system using Kodak's expertise. I would tie in with Amazon et al and make it better, cheaper than doing mass runs the way we do today. It will be challenging, but it is achievable.
The third path I would pursue if I was serving on that board is to use old printing technology to improve 3D printing. I would ask the question, is there a way to focus a beam of light and locally catalyze a reaction so that a crystal can be created layer by layer? If not then is there a way to do something equivalent to this? The answers to these questions might very well be Kodak's long term future.
They better.
The livelihood of 18,800 human beings is on the line. If they fail then the lives of nearly 18,800 families will be torn apart. Failure shouldn't be an option, let alone a strategy.
1) Horrible low light performance from the sensor, which they have deflected by talking up the relatively large aperture of their lens, which is not really even that impressive (f/0.95 would be impressive, maybe even an f/1.4, but f/2? go buy a Panasonic LX5, it blows the Lytro out of the water). 2) No one cares about adjusting focus after the fact, get it right the first time, or don't bother. Even when you can adjust the focus, 99.9% of the time, that feature is only useful for macro photography, which is generally tightly controlled and reproducible at the time of exposure 3) The resolution sucks. 4) The form factor is way too big for a supposedly revolutionary product 5) There is no convenient way to share your photos directly from the device 6) Slow frame rate (again, even the lowly and well aged LX5, which you can buy for around $270 on Amazon right now, blows it out of the water) 7) The UI sucks. They're going for Apple level quality there, but they're a bunch of third rate amateurs. 8) Only hobbyists and pros want to fiddle with an image after it's taken, your average Joe just wants it to look great the second they take it. What's better, red eye reduction in some software on your computer or red eye reduction in the camera?
You know who gives a shit about Lytro? Gadget bloggers do, because it's something new. That's it. The technology is hardly revolutionary. Due to the small sensor size in what they're offering, it's pretty hard to even tell you've shifted focus in anything other than a macro shot. Go look at this example:
http://www.lytro.com/living-pictures/144
This is one of the very few honest examples in their gallery. You can barely detect the focus shift because the depth of field is pretty high already, which is commonly the case with the cameras average users have embraced (wide angle lenses and a small aperture mean that almost any cell phone will guarantee that everything is in focus in a daylight pic). Furthermore, for the vast majority of photography there are not multiple points that should be in focus. 99% of the time, you either want everything in focus or only one thing in focus. Look at this example:
http://www.lytro.com/living-pictures/138
Why would I want only one in focus?? So my gadget blogging buddies can fiddle fuck around with it using some proprietary widget on some website? Jesus.
Lightfield's everything in focus tech comes at a cost that is far, far too high. None of Kodak's expertise can correct for that, because it is basically a question of processing power and what the sensor is optimized for. What do you want? High resolution? Great low light sensitivity? Super high frame rates? Selective focus in editing? Super long battery life? You can't have them all. Consumers won't care about it, pros don't care about it, and there will be a terrible, terrible bunch of reviews as soon as they get to market. I wish they were public so I could short them.
Lenticular printing?? Seriously? Hollywood and every TV manufacturer are slowly realizing (again, because they like to do this every 40 years or so) that almost no one cares about 3D TVs or programming. You want Kodak to go down that path in a format where it's not even as beneficial?
Printing 3D objects is something Kodak could go after, but do they have any expertise whatsoever in that field? Creating a truly revolutionary digital camera (e.g. something that captures things people actually care about, like crazy fast action at a kid's soccer game from 30 yards away like the new Nikon V1 can, and can be shared instantly) is another thing they should go af...
You're underestimating how the technology can be used to simplify the process of taking an image for the average consumer. With the right marketing and UX Lytro could sell their camera as one that 'just works'.
No one wants to bother focusing an image. Everyone is disappointed when a photo comes out blurry. Yeah sure they could invest time into learning how to take better pictures but for a lot of people who just want nice pictures of their friends when they're on holiday/at a club/out for dinner, they don't want to waste their time doing that.
A camera where focusing an image is abstracted away so that the consumer doesn't have to think about it would be a huge step forward. (Think post-shot auto-focus with optional tweaking for when the camera doesn't get it right). Combine this with features already available such as automatic red-eye reduction and the barrier to entry for taking decent quality pictures is much lower. A lot of people would buy that camera.
Simpler than having the camera embedded in your phone so you don't have to carry two devices just to take and send pictures?
Face it if you're a pro you'd carry an SLR and if you're not you'd probably just use your phone.
Almost every DSLR you can buy has already abstracted this away by coming up with really killer AF systems. Cheap consumer cameras and cell phone cameras have abstracted this away by always producing images with a super high depth of field. There is an inherent contradiction in what you're saying about the post-shot tweaking and user simplicity. The camera has to always get it right, there is no post-shot process for anyone other than photo hobbyists and professionals, who represent a small (though not insignificant) market.
I do agree that their technology could be slightly useful for that market, but unfortunately the major use case is when the camera has screwed up, and because of the nature of their technology, the images produced with it are of such mediocre quality that it's almost hard to tell the difference. Even in the macro shots on their demo gallery, the lens itself is so soft and the resolution off the sensor is so poor that shifting the focus isn't even all that rewarding most of the time.
The long and the short of it is that Lytro are not making the kind of camera you are talking about. Sony are with their NEX series. Panasonic are with their GF series. Nikon with the 1 series. The iPhone 4S camera totally destroys the Lytro for apparent image quality, low light performance, dynamic range, and then completlely annihilates them when it comes to actually doing something with your photos...
Lytro's camera is a graduate thesis that grew legs, went mad with delusions of grandeur and tried to con the whole world into thinking that its one basically irrelevant feature is actually revolutionary.
Gadget bloggers believed the hype because that's essentially what they're paid to do.
> 2) No one cares about adjusting focus after the fact, get it right the first time, or don't bother.
You could say the same about exposure, white balance and RAW files.
I'm still shooting film on a manual exposure and manual focus camera, so I know that those features are not strictly necessary, but they surely are convenient.
Personally I shoot with just about everything. A big DSLR, my cellphone, compact digicams, film rangefinders with and without meters, film SLRs, giant medium format and large format cameras, etc. But I am a total freak in that regard. The things that I find enormously useful and fascinating are completely irrelevant to normal people. Unfortunately, normal people won't be fascinated with the Lytro either.
not to mention a dozen times cheaper...
"one killer feature", by the way, is which is what the lytro brings too: take a snap and adjust the focus along with your editor, which is an excelent feature for a photo-journalist. Take a snapshot of that occupy whatever street before u get pepper-sprayed, then adjust to the most dramatic face before putting it live. Awesome!
Regarding other comments about the town... If you're a specialist in a small or medium sized city, and not willing to move, you are at risk. This is true if you are branding specialist in Cincinnati, a Russian literature specialist in Albuquerque, an also if you're an imaging specialist in Rochester. The idea that a company can protect you because it is large is obsolete. By encouraging that thinking, they are making their demise all the more likely.