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this post was submitted on 19 Oct 2024
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This is like Kodak inventing the digital camera and then sitting on it for the next 20 years. Because it doesn't use film. And Kodak is film.
This is not entirely fair, Kodak invested a lot in digital photography, I personally bought a $1500 Kodak digital camera around 2002.
But Kodak could not compete with Canon and other Japanese makers.
To claim Kodak could have made more successful cameras earlier, is ignoring the fact that the technology to make the sensors simply wasn't good enough early on, and would never have been an instant hit for whoever came first to market. Early cameras lacked badly in light sensitivity dynamics and sharpness/resolution. This was due to limitations in even world leading CMOS production capabilities back then, it simply wasn't good enough, and to claim Kodak should have had the capability to leapfrog everybody doesn't make it true.
To claim Kodak could have beat for instance Canon and Sony, is ignoring the fact that those were companies with way more experience in the technologies required to refine digital photography.
Even with the advantage of hindsight, I don't really see a path that would have rescued Kodak. Just like typesetting is dead, and there is no obvious path how a typesetting company could have survived.
That made me true but let's not ignore the huge profit motive for Kodak to keep people on film. That was their money maker.
They had an incentive to keep that technology out of the consumer market.
They absolutely did, but they knew they couldn't do that forever, because Moore's law goes for CMOS too. film photography would end as a mainstream product, so they actually tried to compete both in digital photography, scanners, and photo printing.
But their background was in chemical photo technologies, and they couldn't transfer their know how in that, to be an advantage with the new technologies, even with the research they'd done and the strong brand recognition.
Fujifilm successfully repositioned towards other chemistry. I know there's that Eastman spinoff but why wasn't it as successful?
Yes but Fuji branched out way earlier, and were huge on storage media already in the early 80's.
No doubt Fuji has done better. Fuji is a complex of more than 200 branches.