Kodak stopping camera production

NO this is what they said: "Kodak has announced that, as part of its "ongoing strategic review," it will stop producing digital cameras, pocket video cameras and digital picture frames, but will continue to invest in its film division"- so no they are not leaving the photography business.

I imagine the Point and Shoot business is pretty tough. Stiff competition from all around and the cell phone seems to work pretty nicely for many people. I am just grateful that film survived the cut.

Derek,

On an international basis, the film market is just as competitive and holding its own level in the photography world. Kodak had even mentioned that B&W film sales were increasing. Possibly due to the fact that the people who grew up on digital found old-school film photography NEW to them, hands on fun, with all the creative potential for them. Compared to Digital it is now a niche market. Their photography papers may need an overhaul too. A lot of film photographers are scanning their negs then digitally printing the images. Chemical photography may not survive as the governments outlaw more and more chemicals, and the costs for disposal of the used chemicals keeps rising.

The quality of digital B&W printing keeps improving. So much so that Silver papers may not be needed. The silver in papers is subject to atmospheric corrosion. I recommend the article in the new issue of View Camera. In it is an article by Jon Cone covering the Piezography line of K-7 inks. It is one of very few articles in recent memory that I found interesting and impressive. I would love to try the line out on Canson Rag Photographique and the Canson Baryta.

As it is I am having a Kodak Panoram #4 overhauled for use of 120 film. It will be interesting to see what a 1899 camera can achieve in both color and B&W.

A lot of film is still used in the movie business. Beyond the taking of movies they use safety film to back up Digital movies due to the long term storage issues of digital. Film has a lot of uses in other areas.

CHEERS...Mathew

If you look at it as a whole, it makes complete sense for Kodak to get out of the camera, video camera, and digital frame business.

Those are not growth nor are they high margin areas. Cell phone cameras continue to improve and evolve - offering many of the same features that P/S cameras offer and without the hassle of having a separate device. My guess is that some more players in the PS industry may follow or change over to a mirrorless system (ie Olympus; Fuji) in the not too distant future.

Kodak never was a big player in the DSLR industry. Yes, they did have the ISO 400 Digital Nikon and Digital Canon years before Nikon or Canon came out with their own versions, but they never really released a follow on once the big two produced their DSLR's.

As for sensors, Kodak has already or is in the process of spinning off their sensor unit. So that will survive.

As for the growth in film, it may be similar to the growth in vinyl album sales recently. People have realized that while the CD maintains perfect or near perfect sound reproduction over repeated playings, it lacks the warmth and character that made vinyl sound good.

Dave

Hi David,

When CDs came out, a spinoff from the development of Laserdiscs, music sound engineers estimated CDs would never sound equal to vinyl until they hit 124 bit processing. It never hit that level of processing and so LPs have made new inroads. I am not going back to vinyl as the mastering on most CDs from the film music labels is really quite good. Not to mention you can only buy stuff in the formats they are released in. I prefer a physical item for the money I lay out. So CDs are it.

CHEERS...Mathew

Matthew: Forgive me, but you are a mine of misinformation. CDs were not a 'spinoff' from Laserdisc. CD is a digital medium, LD was analog. The CD was a joint development by Sony and Phillips, who together developed the Red Book standard of 16-bit, 44.1 KHz. The current SACD system uses a 1-bit 2.8224 MHz ADC, which provides four times the data density of the Red Book standard. The extremely high sampling rate insures that brick-wall anti-aliasing filters are no longer necessary. BTW, it's 128-bit, not 124.

I never stopped listening to vinyl myself. About 50 years now I guess. I do not have a super system or anything so CD's and vinyl sound about the same to me. My friend at work spent 20K on his system and he says the vinyl sounds better but then he is a little hard of hearing so I am not sure if he can hear the high notes that great (CD or vinyl). I just never got into buying CD's myself. Kind of skipped them pretty much but I have come across a few as gifts and such over the years. I listen to them in the car sometimes as I do not have a CD player except my laptop.
Playing vinyl is interactive. You generally play them when you wish to listen to music vs having background music. The reason I say this is you have to change the albums quite frequently so it is kind of a busy thing. CD's or radio can just play on and on for hours.

On another note I just was sent a picture of my new grand daughter taken with an iphone. It looks great actually. When my daughter got her first iphone she quit carrying around a point and shoot. She likes the iphone and she can just post up a picture to facebook easily and she keeps her shots on hard drives also. The point is that the Point and shoot is not going to be a growth industry any longer. I guess the wonder gadget of today is a niche market in just a few years.

I read about this on Huffington Post and USA Today. They said that Kodak is discontinuing camera production, pocket video, and digital frames. They will concentrate their consumer division on printers, ink, and paper which is more profitable. They will also continue producing film and photo paper, as well as commercial photo printing products.

It makes sense since the profits are in DSLR's not in P&S's, and Kodak has no presence in the DSLR market. Not only is there too much competition in P&S's, but the P&S market is losing business to cell phone cameras.

It's kind of sad since so many of us started out with Kodak cameras. The first photos I ever took were with my parents Kodak box camera, and my own first camera was a Kodak Instamatic 100 which I still have. I just hope the whole company doesn't go the way of their cameras.

Just remembered, the articles both said that Kodak was trying to find a company to make digital cameras, under license, using the Kodak name. So maybe Kodak cameras will live on.