Print On Demand: Major Announcement Could Change How You Buy Books

[sadievan]

Originally Posted by frahse

The plant I interviewed at was Carolina Eastman. In S.C. Don't know if it is still there.

I still have my mom's old box Kodak, and my own first camera, a Baby Brownie, a neighbor sold to me for a dollar when I was a little kid. I had a number of other Kodak cameras over the years with the many failed technologies Kodak developed that are long gone now, and I gave a son who likes cameras and old things a nice Kodak 35mm, but they will have to pry those first two from my stiff fingers.

Don't have any of the cameras anymore. My parents had a couple of glasses that the company had printed but the printer goofed up. They said Kadok. LOL Don't know whatever happened to them.

[Apache]

Back before Digital film I loved Kodachrome. There was nothing like it for color saturation.
Apache

[Penforhire]

Ever try Velvia? Kodachrome was, perhaps, more realistic but Velvia has serious pop, greater color saturation. Just difficult to work with because the best exposure range was narrow. Ah, the good old days of keeping bricks of film in the fridge...

[ApK]

Originally Posted by robko

Yes and no. Kodak holds a huge portfolio of patents on digital imaging that would have put them at the forefront of the technology if they had commercialized them. Instead they kept making buggy whips and let their competitors come up with other ways of doing digital so their patents aren't nearly as valuable now (OK, so that's a little oversimplified but they had the potential and played it safe with their known film products).

Unless they can make this change for free it's probably a bad overall decision as books are going to specialty for those who want hard copy or digital for the rest.

Kodak is still quite strong in corporate document imaging technology.
Their roll as a household consumer brand has has been marginalized, but that's not the whole company. POD is right up their alley.
And they still make film.

[Apache]

Originally Posted by Penforhire

Ah, the good old days of keeping bricks of film in the fridge...

Apache

[Namekuseijin]

will it print to my e-ink screen?

[MikeB1972]

Originally Posted by Namekuseijin

will it print to my e-ink screen?

Yep, hold the negative about 12 inches in front of the screen and shine a torch on it, the colours will be inverted but as your used to black and white that will be fine. Resolution should be improved as well.

Make sure you have a blank e-ink screen to start with.

[rdfry]

Kodak was a great company once, they took really good care of their employees too bad they couldn't grasp what the future was.

[victauria]

Originally Posted by DrNefario

I'd prefer a machine that chewed up my pbooks and gave me an ebook.

Yes!

[SteveEisenberg]

Originally Posted by rdfry

Kodak was a great company once, they took really good care of their employees too bad they couldn't grasp what the future was.

Kodak was first to market with digital photography and repeatedly was first to market with higher resolution:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodak_DCS

They were probably about as successful as a maker of digital cameras in the 1990's as they had been as a film camera maker during the 1980's. Then a few long-standing competitors managed to produce slightly better products at slightly lower costs. And then increasingly good camera phones meant that a lot of people didn't even need those.

The problem for Kodak was that cameras are a smaller business than film and developing was, and a business in which there are more good competitors. Kodak grasped the future, as did the competitors. What Kodak couldn't do was replicate in digital cameras the dominant market share they had had in photographic chemicals.

It's unrealistic to think they could lose the biggest part of their business -- chemicals -- without downsizing. And the downsized company could not support the large number of retirees from back when they were bigger. This, and not inability to grasp, is why they are in bankruptcy.

You could say that Fuji did better than Kodak. But a lot of people lost good jobs there as well.

[Penforhire]

While Kodak was indeed a leader in many ways, I recall lusting after the Leaf camera backs (used on 4x5 cameras, which I was using at the time) before the Kodak 35 mm backs, which went on already-expensive Nikon 8008s bodies (I still have a 8008s with a data back somewhere, that Kodak DCS must've weighed a ton!).

The meat of the market had to be complete (consumer) digicams. Kodak made too many clunky models. They had a neat dock system but memory card readers shortly became ubiquitous (and now wifi). Sony made early digicams that directly wrote onto 3.5" floppy disks. Very convenient at the time. Seems to me I always thought of Kodak as a second-rate player in the integrated digicam space.