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Great article from The Economist on what mistakes Kodak made and what led them to bankruptcy compared to Fujifilm: http://www.economist.com/node/21542796 http:/

Great article from The Economist on what mistakes Kodak made and what led them to bankruptcy compared to Fujifilm: http://www.economist.com/node/21542796 http://www.economist.com/node/21542796

gchpaco 15y ago
There's been a lot of wink-wink nudge-nudge over the years to the effect that Fujifilm was subsidized by the Japanese government; to what extent this was the favorable tax deals Kodak also got and to what extent it was real was and is hard to assess, but it is certainly the case that Fuji was not burdened by the antitrust pressure that led Kodak to divest itself of its camera-making arm in the middle of the 20th century. There's a lot of claims to the effect that Fuji piggybacked on the pioneering Kodak research work, and this is very difficult to refute, but if they did they at least equaled Kodak in quality. When people talk about "cheaper film" it was, but not that much cheaper and at least the equal in quality, sometimes better; I found Fuji's consumer films to be far preferable to that turd Kodak called Gold 400. No one in the industry was really prepared for the nose dive film sales took; essentially only die-hards like me still buy it. Film was and is to some degree still capable of more resolution, more dynamic range, better color fidelity and less prone to weird errors in the way that a Bayer sensor does (almost every Bayer ever sold to consumers had a detail destroying filter attached to it because the alternative is horrific Moire effects), but the speed of editing digital caused it to take off like a rocket. I suppose the lesson to be learned there is that Kodak spent a century making the very best film it possibly could (for the professional lines, anyway) when it turns out the market is perfectly happy with a 4 MP digital with a mediocre lens and chromatic abberation out the arse if it cuts the feedback loop down from days to seconds. I have mixed feelings about Kodak in general--they had a tendency to make bizarre decisions that led the few film enthusiasts remaining to believe that it was simply a matter of time before everything got the shaft and they would have to switch to something else anyway. They also made a lot of really bad digital cameras, which was strange considering the superb reputation their press lenses and the Retina had back in the day. Fujifilm never divested itself of its cameramaking arm and continues to make some of the best lenses in the business to this day, and I think that has been a very important strength for them.
- masklinn 15y ago
  > but the speed of editing digital caused I'd also expect the storage convenience to have had an impact, you can store dozens to hundreds of pictures in a memory card the size of a nail (a pretty huge nail for CF cards, but most of the market will be consumers shooting on SD anyway) and you can offload them into a computer or a bigger storage system at the end of the day, instead of having to lug around cases of film. There's also the ability to quickly remove "failed" or extra shoots on the spot without wasting a valuable spot in the card, where film... a photo taken is a spot taken, no going back. > I suppose the lesson to be learned there is that Kodak spent a century making the very best film it possibly could (for the professional lines, anyway) when it turns out the market is perfectly happy with a 4 MP digital with a mediocre lens and chromatic abberation out the arse if it cuts the feedback loop down from days to seconds. I'm not sure your argument is much helped by you comparing professional film with consumer point-and-shoot from 5 years ago.
  - gchpaco 15y ago
    Actually one of the cameras I was sort of thinking of when I wrote that was Nikon's D1H, which was very low resolution and not great at controlling sensor noise but was very popular among sports photojournalists because it was very very fast in use. If you were interested in the quality of the photograph you got, they were incredibly unappetizing. But even comparing consumer film lines to consumer digicams of five years ago, the film had it all over the digicam in terms of resolution, color fidelity, responsiveness (not unusual for there to be a multi second lag time between pressing the button and a photo being taken on those), just technically slaughtered. But because you get results right now and don't need to spend $6 getting it developed, hey. One of the reasons 4 MP was enough was because consumers rarely enlarge a photograph past the 4x6 prints they get from the mini lab, so the advantages turn out to be mostly not interesting.
    - dpark 15y ago
      For the average consumer, $6 is probably less of an issue than the hassle of physically going to the drug store to get the pictures developed. I don't want to part with my 6 bucks, but I really don't want to waste two round trips to the store to get physical images when I could instead just upload them to the website of my choice (for free or at least cheap). Beyond that, film is just a pain in the ass. You can carry a single card that holds hundreds of images, or you can carry 4 rolls of film and get 96 images. Every time you take a picture, you're counting down the number of images you can take. And you need to buy the right ISO, even though you're an amateur and don't know what the hell ISO is. Film was destined to die out for casual photographers as soon as digital reached the "meh, these photos are okay" stage, because "okay" is good enough for most people, and film is just so inconvenient in comparison to digital.

Great article from The Economist on what mistakes Kodak made and what led them to bankruptcy compared to Fujifilm: http://www.economist.com/node/21542796 http://www.economist.com/node/21542796

gchpaco 15y ago

There's been a lot of wink-wink nudge-nudge over the years to the effect that Fujifilm was subsidized by the Japanese government; to what extent this was the favorable tax deals Kodak also got and to what extent it was real was and is hard to assess, but it is certainly the case that Fuji was not burdened by the antitrust pressure that led Kodak to divest itself of its camera-making arm in the middle of the 20th century. There's a lot of claims to the effect that Fuji piggybacked on the pioneering Kodak research work, and this is very difficult to refute, but if they did they at least equaled Kodak in quality. When people talk about "cheaper film" it was, but not that much cheaper and at least the equal in quality, sometimes better; I found Fuji's consumer films to be far preferable to that turd Kodak called Gold 400. No one in the industry was really prepared for the nose dive film sales took; essentially only die-hards like me still buy it. Film was and is to some degree still capable of more resolution, more dynamic range, better color fidelity and less prone to weird errors in the way that a Bayer sensor does (almost every Bayer ever sold to consumers had a detail destroying filter attached to it because the alternative is horrific Moire effects), but the speed of editing digital caused it to take off like a rocket. I suppose the lesson to be learned there is that Kodak spent a century making the very best film it possibly could (for the professional lines, anyway) when it turns out the market is perfectly happy with a 4 MP digital with a mediocre lens and chromatic abberation out the arse if it cuts the feedback loop down from days to seconds. I have mixed feelings about Kodak in general--they had a tendency to make bizarre decisions that led the few film enthusiasts remaining to believe that it was simply a matter of time before everything got the shaft and they would have to switch to something else anyway. They also made a lot of really bad digital cameras, which was strange considering the superb reputation their press lenses and the Retina had back in the day. Fujifilm never divested itself of its cameramaking arm and continues to make some of the best lenses in the business to this day, and I think that has been a very important strength for them.

masklinn 15y ago
> but the speed of editing digital caused I'd also expect the storage convenience to have had an impact, you can store dozens to hundreds of pictures in a memory card the size of a nail (a pretty huge nail for CF cards, but most of the market will be consumers shooting on SD anyway) and you can offload them into a computer or a bigger storage system at the end of the day, instead of having to lug around cases of film. There's also the ability to quickly remove "failed" or extra shoots on the spot without wasting a valuable spot in the card, where film... a photo taken is a spot taken, no going back. > I suppose the lesson to be learned there is that Kodak spent a century making the very best film it possibly could (for the professional lines, anyway) when it turns out the market is perfectly happy with a 4 MP digital with a mediocre lens and chromatic abberation out the arse if it cuts the feedback loop down from days to seconds. I'm not sure your argument is much helped by you comparing professional film with consumer point-and-shoot from 5 years ago.
- gchpaco 15y ago
  Actually one of the cameras I was sort of thinking of when I wrote that was Nikon's D1H, which was very low resolution and not great at controlling sensor noise but was very popular among sports photojournalists because it was very very fast in use. If you were interested in the quality of the photograph you got, they were incredibly unappetizing. But even comparing consumer film lines to consumer digicams of five years ago, the film had it all over the digicam in terms of resolution, color fidelity, responsiveness (not unusual for there to be a multi second lag time between pressing the button and a photo being taken on those), just technically slaughtered. But because you get results right now and don't need to spend $6 getting it developed, hey. One of the reasons 4 MP was enough was because consumers rarely enlarge a photograph past the 4x6 prints they get from the mini lab, so the advantages turn out to be mostly not interesting.
  - dpark 15y ago
    For the average consumer, $6 is probably less of an issue than the hassle of physically going to the drug store to get the pictures developed. I don't want to part with my 6 bucks, but I really don't want to waste two round trips to the store to get physical images when I could instead just upload them to the website of my choice (for free or at least cheap). Beyond that, film is just a pain in the ass. You can carry a single card that holds hundreds of images, or you can carry 4 rolls of film and get 96 images. Every time you take a picture, you're counting down the number of images you can take. And you need to buy the right ISO, even though you're an amateur and don't know what the hell ISO is. Film was destined to die out for casual photographers as soon as digital reached the "meh, these photos are okay" stage, because "okay" is good enough for most people, and film is just so inconvenient in comparison to digital.