my take on Kodak downfall

and cheap overseas products is not an excuse, they had NAFTA and were
making consumer digital cameras in Mexico

 

they had NAFTA and a consumer camera plant in Mexico, they were right on
time I tell you, it was not an accounting problem, or a strategic
problem, it was a corporate culture problem

 

none of that matters.

what matters is as you say, corporate culture.

the management were a bunch of clueless fucks, who despite claiming
that digital was going to replace film, did not invest in digital.

 

other than the dslr hybrids which cost more than a car and were
basically a technology demo more than a commercially viable product,
kodak's digital cameras were *horrible*.

it doesn't matter where they were made (nobody really cares). they were
basically junk.

i remember trying one of them at a trade show, and to change the
shutter speed or aperture, you had to wade through *four* levels of
menus (no joke). who the hell thought that was a good idea?

 

An old story. American electronics manufacturers dinked around with
overpriced transistor radios. Then the Japanese introduced transistor
radios for cheap and followed up with transistor TVs and a bunch of
other solid-state consumer electronics products for not cheap and ate
their lunch.

 

Have you ever used one? The Kodak DC-120 served me well from the time I
got it shortly after launch until the second generation digital Ixus
came out. It had a wide range of shutter settings and a fast f2.5 lens
of reasonable quality. It was perfectly good enough for website work
back them and it was about as sensitive as the human eye on its 16s
button setting. It did have a warm corner but you could fix that with
darkframe subtraction. It was widely used in early digital scientific
imaging because you could get it to return the raw Bayer sensor array a
feature not present on any other camera at the time or since.

They were not junk. Mine is still going although an only just a
megapixel camera now is nothing to write home about back in the late
1990's it was impressive (it also cost about £1000 back then).

The only problem I ever had with mine was that batteries didn't last
very long at all in it and it would eat a set a couple of hours use.

 

XYZ is CIE-XYZ

unless bayer used an used big-CIE-RGB he made an assumption on the RGB
and the doubling of G cells that is not an assumption of the eyes
response like CIE-XYZ or CIE-bigRGB

 

USA has NAFTA available, this is not an excuse

Kodak had a plant in Mexico making consumer digital cameras under NAFTA

 

no, I tell you it was people

 

the dc120 might have been ok, but it came out very early in the game.

their later cameras were pretty bad, especially with the easyshare
nonsense, and at that point, there were a *lot* of competitors and
kodak had nothing compelling to offer versus the competition.

 

facts?

 

oh, where to start.

with a market share of under 1% and shrinking, sigma's cameras have
been a complete disaster. not only do they not sell particularly well,
but they are a money loser for the company.

foveon originally was backed by two venture capital firms, who soon
realized they'd been had and what a fuckup it was, so they bailed.

that left foveon, whose only customer was sigma, without any money and
about to file for bankruptcy.

had that happened, sigma would have been completely screwed, so sigma
bought foveon at firesale prices and has been sinking money into it
ever since.

the cameras are utter crap (and yes, i've used them).

they're anything but consistent. two photos in a row might look totally
different, despite the settings being identical. the sd14 was pig slow
(around 6 seconds write time) and you actually had to wait until it
finished, or the camera could lock up and you'd lose photos. the sd14
was *really* buggy and sometimes locked up even if you weren't taking
photos one after another

the sd14 originally was $2000 msrp ($1600 street), which quickly
dropped due to slow sales, and around a year later, it was being sold
off for $300-400, new, and even at that price, people still weren't
buying all that many.

the sd1 originally was pitched at a ridiculous $9700 msrp (~$6000
street) which was complete insanity for a 15 megapixel camera. even the
fanbois were stunned. not surprisingly, sigma did not sell very many
cameras at that price.

as best as i can tell, they sold about 10, total, based on posts in the
sigma forum and serial number analysis (which is encoded in every
photo, btw, so it's easy to track).

after tens of thousands of unsold cameras sat in warehouses, sigma
slashed the price by roughly $4000 in one day, and the price has
dropped even *further* since then.

the dp1/2/3 series have been riddled with lens motor failures, where
the lens just gets stuck extending out or back in, along with all the
usual problems with the sensor.

sigma tries to claim more accurate colour, but the delta-e is much
higher than bayer, which means *less* accurate colour.

sigma claims 'no guessing' of colour data, yet there's more 'guessing'
than bayer because they don't actually capture rgb at every location
(another lie of theirs). the spectra of the layers overlap by quite a
bit and there's a shitload of very complex math to extract rgb from it,
which is one reason why the software is slow and the results are noisy
and with weird colour casts.

the first foveon camera, the 3.4 megapixel sd9, did not sell well, so
they decided to lie about the number of pixels in the sd10 because
'bigger numbers are better', despite the camera having the same sensor.

normally that's called fraud, but somehow, they managed to get away
with it.

sigma's software is slow and buggy and there aren't any viable options
from third parties. even adobe has given up supporting it. part of the
'sigma look' is heavy sharpening. if you set the sigma software to 0
sharpening, you're actually getting a wallop of sharpening. you have to
set it to -1 to -2 to get 'none', depending on version.

foveon sensors are theoretically interesting, but they are riddled with
problems and actually don't offer anything the eye can see anyway. it's
a solution in search of a problem.

foveon sensors have substantially higher noise, lower colour accuracy,
lower resolution, worse high iso performance and higher manufacturing
cost.

that's a huge price to pay for 'full colour', something humans can't
even see anyway.

three layer sensors sound like a good idea on paper, and one day they
might be feasible without significant tradeoffs, but they sure as hell
are not now.

if that day comes, the technology won't need lies to market it. it will
sell itself because it's actually better.

on the other hand, bayer is a very clever design based on how the human
eye works. it's cost-effective to manufacture and works exceptionally
well for creating photos that humans look at.

 

If you are saying Sigma markets crap, I agree.
If you are saying that Foveon is not ready for prime time, you are
probably right.

What I am saying is that Foveon has potential worth exploring, if only
for scientific purposes.

Not true. think VCR & Betamax.
think WordPerfect & Word
Both are examples of the triumph of marketing over quality.

 

not only am i right, but foveon is never going to be ready for prime
time because it's not physically possible.

not even sigma can break the laws of physics.

exploring the technology is one thing. there's nothing wrong with that.

many companies are looking into multilayer sensors, including nikon,
canon and fuji and i think sony too.

the difference is that those companies are working on perfecting the
technology so that it actually *is* better than what exists now and
*then* turning it into a product.

what sigma is doing is taking half-baked technology that is clearly
worse than what exists now, lying about what it can and cannot do,
faking some of it in software and claiming it does stuff that is not
physically possible.

 

I disagree with you about Kodak never making cameras that were any
good. In the days before the SLRs captured the attention and money of
every amateur photographer as well as the pros, Kodak made some decent
cameras under their Retina Brand. Most of the good ones were made in
Germany with decent lenses and shutters. They were rangefinder cameras
with (usually) non-interchangeable 50mm lenses, but they were optically
and mechanically good and took good pictures for their day. Their day
ended when every wannabee bought a Nikon F or a Nikkormat. On the
otherhand, all those "wannabees" learned what f stops were and how to
properly expose pictures and focus lenses, something today's DSLR
"wannabees" don't bother to learn because the automation makes it
unnecessary if all they want is an expensive and pompous point and
shoot. Sorry for rambling a little bit OT.

 

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Indeed. While many of the Retina series were overly complex (they were
German, after all) and mechanically troublesome, you cant say they
didn't take a hell of a picture. Some of the best pictures I've ever
taken were with the utterly manual Retina IIa I used to carry
everywhere.

Granted, that was 40 years ago, and the camera wasn't new even then -
but Kodak had their glory says. At one time, I could open the Kodak
catalog at my camera store, and order every single thing a serious
photographer could need, from film, through cameras, to darkroom and on
to mounting supplies.

 

Sitting on the desk next to me are a Kodak Retinette 1A that I bought
for $8 last year in an antique store- sadly inoperative and not worth
restoring, but it has a 45mm f/2.8 Schneider Kreutznach lens. And next
to it is a VERY functional Kodak Retina Automatic III. The automatic
part doesn't work but it's a good manual camera with a Retina-Xenar
f/2.8 45mm Schneider Kreutznach. It takes fine pictures, currently has
my very last roll of Ektachrome in it. I got it as part of a 4-camera
lot at auction a few months ago for $22.