Aus, regarding Kodak:
It's true that Kodak encouraged a standard for CF, but still has not embraced the CF concept wholeheartedly. There is a great deal of reluctance among Kodak higher level managers to give up on traditional film, inasmuch as their careers often are tied to this older technology. They also see the whole concept of photography differently from many consumers and serious amateur photographers. To Kodak, heaven is where you come to a store, buy Kodak film, take it back to the store for processing, using Kodak chemicals and paper, and order extra prints, enlargements, etc., all done by the store using Kodak material. The thought that a consumer might want to make a digital photo, work with it on his computer, similar to the way someone works with a word processing text or spreadsheet, is still very foreign to Kodak decisionmakers (the one's who count).
Though Kodak maintains a presence in the digital photography market, they have given up on providing cameras with 2 m+ pixel resolution for the consumer market (under $1000), letting Nikon, Fuji, and Olympus take over that market. That's a big mistake, in my view, because high resolution is what serious amateurs want. I believe Kodak's reluctance is based more on its determination to recover its $500 million investment in the recently introduced Advanced Photo System. APS, a traditional film system with a smaller, theoretically lower cost format than 35mm (also lower resolution), in effect competes with digital in Kodak's mind. Therefore, it appears Kodak is sacrificing digital in order to get a better return on its much larger APS investment. APS fits perfectly with the old Kodak view of heaven - you have to go to the store to get it processed. You get a sheet of small sized (thumbnail) prints, from which you select the ones you'd like enlarged - again by the dealer, not by you.
As it happens, I live in an area near Rochester, where there is a large and growing Mennonite population. Horses and buggies are popular here, and one can find quite a lot of manufacturing activity for new improved buggies. But somehow, I think the main thrust of improvements in the transportation sector is going in a different direction. |
