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To: SWAMPSNIPER

There are things they could probably still do.

Not everybody wants to spend a lifetime on Photoshop, for example, going over every single detail in photographs to get things right.

Kodak could probably offer after-photo services that many people would probably pay for.


6 posted on 02/09/2012 10:46:02 PM PST by Jonty30 (What Islam and secularism have in common is that they are both death cults.)
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To: Jonty30

A company once called Applied Science Fiction, of Austin, Texas, sold image correction and enhancement software that got bundled with many film scanners. They called their products “Digital ICE” and “Digital GEM.”

Kodak bought them in 2003.

The main motivation behind the purchase was not the image-correcting software, but rather a do-it-yourself while-you-wait film processor of which the small company had prototypes out in the field.

The customer would come into the store, drop their 35 mm or APS film cassette into a slot, and the machine would develop the film and scan it on the spot...took about 5 minutes. (As you might imagine, the machine internally was an electromechanical marvel.)

The customer could order prints immediately from the built-in printer, or get a CD of the images, or just leave them on the internal hard drive, where they would be available for return visits up to a few weeks later.

The original film was processed in a way that destroyed it; the chemical process left the film unfixed, so the image would go completely black in just a few minutes. The machine simply spooled the still-damp film onto a waste reel which would be unloaded every few days by a technician, who would send it off for silver reclamation.

Kodak bought the company already knowing that consumer film was becoming obsolete, but they figured that this technology might extend the life of their film products a couple of years. Soon, they decided they had miscalculated the market, and they shut the whole operation down.

I presume that Kodak still does something commercial with A.S.F’s original image-fixing products.


22 posted on 02/10/2012 5:01:10 AM PST by Erasmus (Able was I ere I saw this crappy little island.)
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