[Daub]

I believe that Kodak’s missed opportunity was in not realizing the social sharing potential of digital photography. They had all the ingredients: the first digital camera, the almost first online sharing of photos… but didn’t grok it. Instead they clung to existing outdated models. A camera nowadays is a different animal to what it was when there were such things as height street photographers.

Compare that to the increadidble lateral thinking they employed when they re-packaged their movie film stock into short rolls, made a cheap-ass camera to accommodate it (the box brownie) and established a printing service to process the results. Pure genius.

[exasperaited]

> I believe that Kodak’s missed opportunity was in not realizing the social sharing potential of digital photography.

They were screwed long before capitalising on this was a real possibility. The damage was done to Kodak before the vast majority of consumers had fast enough broadband to share more than a couple of photographs a day.

Kodak was an obviously cheesy, out-of-touch, cheap-looking digital brand by 2000, and it showed (at least to anyone outside the USA). The Fuji, Olympus, Nikon and Canon compacts were better-designed, full stop, and Kodak really even had nothing good in the "office camera", "lab camera" or "art department camera" offerings (which Nikon owned with the Coolpix 900 series, and Canon with the G1/G2/G3).

People simply would not have bought into the idea that anything Kodak did was cool or fun. It was the same bad cheesy smiling family branding nonsense.

[actionfromafar]

The year 2000 Canon was also the year 2000 Kodak:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_EOS_D2000

[exasperaited]

I was talking about compact cameras there, because realistically that is all almost anyone was buying, even in corporate environments.

I think they sold in the low thousands of that DSLR (since it was a $15K camera). And the state of these partnership cameras was such that it was obvious they were something of a bridge to nowhere. Anyone could see that once Canon and Nikon began making their own things, Kodak would have trouble carrying on with their remodelled cameras.

Nikon had already shipped their first "conventional" in-house DSLR by then, and it was blowing people away.

Kodak should arguably have bought Sigma around then, but they didn't. They continued making these reworked/hybrid Canon/Nikon things until 2004 but when they quit making DSLRs they said the sector had "poor profitability". In 2005! Even Nikon was making a profit in 2005.

Back to the compact cameras:

This is the higher-end compact camera Canon shipped in 2000 (that all the real estate photographers were using):

https://www.dpreview.com/reviews/canong1

This is its Nikon competition, which was an incredible camera widely used in professional settings; they turned up in labs attached to microscopes, in rapid newspaper repro, in museums, web development agencies, all over the place:

https://www.dpreview.com/reviews/nikoncp990

Sony, Fuji and Olympus had great kit in this segment already. Kodak really just had nothing even close as far as enthusiasts and early adopters were concerned.

[actionfromafar]

These are really good points. And Kodak should have bought Sigma, that would have been a power move.

[exasperaited]

I never understood it.

I guess the Sigma film SLRs and DSLRs were in some ways functionally behind (in terms of stuff like handling and autofocus), and it wouldn't necessarily be cheap to catch up. Also early-2000s era Sigma didn't actually own all of Foveon yet, I suppose.

There has always been some suggestion that Sigma didn't entertain offers to become a big camera brand because it would lose the quiet tolerance it had earned from Japanese camera brands that allowed it to make most of its money from third-party lenses without squabbles over proprietary information.

[actionfromafar]

I too, always wondered about that lens protocol issue with Sigma.