Sad days for Eastman Kodak.. According to The Wall Street Journal in this article, Kodak are about to seek bankruptcy protection in the coming weeks! Something tells me Google might be snapping up some of those patents up for sale on the cheap..
Incompetent senior management who for many many years just refused point blank to see the writing on the wall. The arrogance of a huge global near monopoly company faced with more agile competition. Tragic as they had such wonderful products, it broke my heart when they shut down the Kodachrome lines and processing labs, is it surprising that only a few years later the company itself is under threat of extinction? In spite of the arrogance of the senior management they were still major players in the digital arena, indeed my first digital camera in 2000 was a Kodak, it was what brought me back to photography after an absence of many years. Yes really sad.
I find it very sad when a company with a household name like Kodak ends up like this. The downfall of the Kodak is totally due to the incompetence of their senior management to manage the business in the face of a new era of digital photography. Which, incidently was actually all started (but totally misunderstaood and mismanaged) by themselves. I'm sure oss will correct me if I'm wrong, but I understand that digital camera's were was first created by Kodak in the 1970's. It's unbelieveable to think how the opportunity was squandered, given the history and innovation of Kodak from those very early days. It's very sad news for the employees who will likely be looking for another job, but I doubt that the Kodak name or company will be missed.
Missed..??? Dunno about that........... But the incompetence shown into not capitalizing into their own inventions and patents over the years, deserves punishment, maybe not as harsh as that but modern business is extremely demanding and fluid and at the same time a destroyer of complacent attitudes. Thousands of employees worldwide, will feel the repercussions for years... I am sorry for them.
Yeah you are quite right Peter, but it was said of them that the reps were arrogant and had an easy time of it, that is true and I remember them coming in selling us paper and chemistry in vast quantities in the 80's it was a cushy number for them and as has been pointed out on the web they had huge margins because of their dominant position. It used to cost in 1979 around 10 quid for an A0 length of high quality technical paper for printing a 35mm microfilm of a technical drawing back to full size, we sold that on after printing and processsing at 40 quid or thereabouts, at the time I earned about 80 quid a week which was pretty desperate but Kodak's margins on that paper were just as large as ours probably higher as we could have quite high levels of waste, we used to buy it in 30 metre rolls, 10 or more rolls at a time vast amounts of the stuff and vast amounts of rollfilm as well. The camera's we used back then cost upwards of 20,000 pounds (that's the actual number not adjusted into today's money) and Kodak supplied them, giant things and incredible resolution of well over 135 line pairs per millimetre, hard to match that even today. They had their fingers in every corner of the industry. As for digital, they just could not see it's relentless march and yeah they did invent the first digital stills camera using a CCD sensor. Their technical people wrote this in a report on the device - Famous last words.
You better do............. It will be as cheap as chips for a few weeks, due to the announcement, but after a while the price will climb considerably due to the stuff becoming rarer and rarer to find... Sort of like rocking horse poo... Really................
Third party companies will start selling ink for it (and they already do), so getting ink should be easy so long as you know where to find it!
Some problems associated with printers is, as I discovered at my costly experience,the simple fact that the inks have been developed especially for those proprietary brands. For a short while I used fill your own, and also replacement cartridges, but invariably the blasted nozzles clogged up, and in the end it was much cheaper to buy a new printer than having the bugger fixed. I was given an Epson sx405 a couple of years ago, as Christmas present from one of the kids, as he was working in a computer shop. Providing ink for it was no problem as the said shop was the Epson local service centre, but now, with the lad having moved to another posiotion somwhere else, I find myself shopping around for ink, and although I see alternatives at 1/3d of the price in some other places, I always refrain to buy them...
