Can anyone tell me what company actually manufactured the Kodak EasyShare Z7590 camera? It has a Schneider Kreuznach zoom lens. Did Kodak make this thing?
Thanks.
Made in China, designed in Japan . i have one-the lense is excellent. Alas, kodak is out of the camera biz…and probably will be gone within 5 years.
Probably Flextronics, based on this 2006 article from PC Magazine:
FWIW, Schneider had been making lenses for Kodak since the 50’s.
Thanks all. It’s sad a great American company like Kodak missed the digital boat.
I should know the answer to this, but what exactly happened to them, as they were one of the pioneers of digital photography. In fact, before the revolutionary Nikon D1, I remember the Kodak DCS digital slr cameras (basically, a Kodak digital back strapped into a Nikon [or sometimes Canon] body) being used by photojournalists. Is it that they just didn’t dedicate enough resources to R&D to keep up with digital development?
I personally feel that they did not want to cannibalize their core business of film and film developing and as such did not push development of digital cameras. Even if Kodak did have a good foothold in the digital camera space they would be a much smaller company than when they could sell tons of film and developer chemicals.
The book “Billion-Dollar Lessons” has a very extensive write-up of the Kodak saga, but as gazpacho alluded to they saw digital as a threat to their chemical film business, not a new business opportunity that they could get a jump start in. So they tried to figure out how digital could enhance their film business (investing heavily in consumer printers, bringing out one of the dumbest products ever- a digital camera where you’d review and select the number of prints you wanted on the screen and then bring it in the the photolab to get your prints) rather than a paradigm shift.
Threat or no threat, did Kodak ever have any expertise in designing and producing cameras? I thought their core competency was in film. And also, once cameras became digital, then their production becomes much like any other consumer electronics item and the companies already in that business are going to be better suited to designing, making and selling digital camera.
In fairness, they didn’t miss it. They rode it all the way to shore. Kodak was first to market with digital SLRs and it was a decade before anybody else was selling them. And Kodak had a big share of consumer digital cameras until that business started drying up and foreign manufacturers drove the costs down to the point where it was no longer worthwhile.
Mdcastle is right about Kodak’s other strategic missteps, but what was the alternative? If people aren’t buying cameras and aren’t making prints, where should they have shifted? Smartphones? Web services?
Perhaps I misspoke. I’ve always been puzzled at what happened at Kodak, but I do know they sold a hell of a lot of digital cameras - without really pushing them like they always pushed their film and processing and printing products. I don’t ever remember seeing Kodak digital camera ads on TV but every five minutes it seemed Kodak was carping about the cost of inkjet printer ink.
What Kodak failed to notice was the public’s increasing resistance to printing photographs themselves. But they had their bases covered when they bought OFOTO - they thought. I’m convinced most people never bother with hard copies of their photos at all anymore. An iPad screen looks pretty sweet, and you carry a phone with your pics on it, why fuck around with paper and ink?
My first camera was a Kodak Brownie Hawkeye (I still have it) and my first three digital camera were all Kodak. They were excellent cameras, with good German glass always and easy to use. They took spectacular shots and I still use my Z7590 as a sidearm when I’m running macro on my Canon SLR. I filmed all my kid’s high school wrestling matches with it. Great cameras all. So what happened? Why couldn’t a company with their legendary engineering and design prowess succeed at the consumer digital camera market? They already had low-cost manufacturing done overseas. I know the cost of digital printers came down so much every asshole and his brother bought one and went into the commercial printing business (a revolution for sure, until the bottom dropped out when the competition and recession weeded out lots of wannabee printers.) But why couldn’t they adapt? Was it GM syndrome, ossified management, what?
Reading their (company-generated) history http://www.kodak.com/ek/US/en/Our_Company/History_of_Kodak/Milestones_-_chronology/2010-2012.htm leaves me puzzled; it seems like it all fell apart all at once. Did they sell the wrong assets? It just seems like they should have been swinging the world by the tail, not wallowing, belly-up and bloated in a pan of fixer.
Kodak was always going to need to be a much smaller company even if they owned all of the digital camera business. Kodak’s camera business was always a much smaller portion of the revenue and profits than the film and developer products. It is really hard to shrink a company there tends to be debt that has to be serviced that cannot be serviced on lower revenue.
Kodak always made cameras - they were pioneers of the “razor and blades” model much like Gillette- except in their case it was “cameras and film.”
Where they fucked up was when they viewed digital photography as a threat to their film business (like others have said), and didn’t realize that the barriers to entry on making digital cameras are a LOT lower than in manufacturing, distributing and processing film.
So basically they disregarded the digital photographic market for the most part, and concentrated on film- that was their big cash cow, after all.
Meanwhile, literally any electronics company that could buy lens assemblies, LCDs, CCDs and rig the rest of the electronics up dove into the digital camera world with both feet.
By the time Kodak saw the writing on the wall, they were stuck with digital cameras that were still inexpensive like their film cameras, but without the film to make money on, and they had a LOT more competition.
There weren’t really that many camera companies back in the day- you had Canon, Nikon, Olympus, Pentax, Kodak, Minolta and Vivitar that I can think of off hand.
We still have most of those in the digital space, but with the addition of electronics companies like Sony, Samsung, Casio, Epson, Panasonic and Ricoh, all of which make decent digital cameras.
Their film instamatics for the typical consumer sold like hotcakes.
Frankly, I’m not surprised by what happened to Kodak. They had extensive monopoly power in film and film processing, a sector that was in a technological cul-de-sac. For a while they hoped that they could sell cheap film cameras in developing countries, but discovered to their dismay that the market there preferred to leap directly into digital. Faster cutting of costs and tougher labor negotiation might have staved off bankruptcy. But so what? They still would have faced collapsing revenues and become a shadow of their former self. The fundamentals simply weren’t going their way.
I think that’s a big part of it- they could have accepted that they were going to become a smaller fish in a somewhat new pond, but they and their shareholders were expecting big-Kodak type returns, which just weren’t/aren’t there in the market of digital cameras, photo printers and the like. Too much competition, and no real proprietary cash cow like film was. They basically had to make their money selling hardware, which wasn’t really their strong point.
You forgot Apple, which is the de facto leader in this market.
Kodak was never primarily a camera company, they were a consumables company. They made money selling film and paper and chemicals. It wasn’t a matter of them not understanding digital so much as it was the inescapable fact that digital made their consumables irrelevant. Not just for consumer photography, but for x-rays and motion picture and all of the other businesses they were in. There was no place for them to pivot to.
The failure of Kodak wasn’t due to their fear of digital or their unwillingness to abandon film. I think historians will pin their failures on management doubling down on the consumables market, with forays into printer kiosks and consumer inkjet, while selling off the pieces of their portfolio that had lasting value: CMOS image sensors, OLED displays, satellite imaging, medical imaging, clincial diagnostics, and precision optics… just to name a few.
Kodak sold off all of these business – which are thriving under different ownership – and spent the money to bankroll their more recent misadventures. If they’d kept those technologies, Kodak would be thriving today.
You’re right- but even had they kept those items in their portfolio, they probably wouldn’t be making returns like in film’s heyday. But still, it was the doubling-down on consumables that doomed them.
And Apple’s a great example of unexpected competition in the digital camera segment, actually. (although I kind of lament the crappy cameras in iPhones being so common; other cameras are so much better, but 90% of pictures I see are taken on iPhones nowadays)
(But consider the film speed equivalent of even a bad camera phone. Way above ASA 400, which provided middling quality in color.)
Good analysis..however, Kodak had the example of Polaroid-and followed the same path! Polaroid sold off all of their profitable businesses, in order to keep the losers going. Same result. Question: do CEOs read these stories? It doesn’t take a genius to learn a few lessons.
I tend to think that a lot of CEOs get a combination of tunnel vision about what their company’s business is, and have a certain amount of arrogance; after all, they got to be CEO by being successful and knowing what’s up.
By tunnel vision, I mean that they get convinced that the company does business in X market or space, and don’t see the alternatives, or worse, don’t see that the business has changed, and that they do business in X market, but make their money in Y way.
For example, where I work, we provide a service (health care), but in some sense, the clients are paying for the reporting at the end of the quarter. Yet for the longest time the executives spent all their time dwelling on the patient experience, and that kind of thing, and ignored the actual reporting and data gathering. Stupid. We lost clients as a result… ones whose individual patients loved us.