Kodak to stop selling traditional cameras in U.S.

Reuters | January 13, 2004

[Paleo Conservative]

Buy American!

What is American about an Orwellian bureaucracy?

[Doctor Stochastic]

Studebaker, Packard, Stanley Steamer, Fatimas, Digital Equipment, Red Dot potato chips, Duncan Heines Chocolate Chip Cookies, Sambo's Restaurants, Howard Johnson's Restaurants, the Cunard Line, Kaypro, Morrow, Osborne, Sinclair, Tandy, Wang, Union Carbide, Eastern Air Lines, North Central Airlines, Braniff, Southwestern Bell, Oldsmobile, Nash, Henry J, IG Farben, De Soto, Furr's Supermarkets, Du Mont TV Network, Dallas Texans, Boston Braves, Popular Dry Goods, Washington Senators.\

[roadcat]

"Canon is currently capturing the Digital SLR market."

I bought my Canon 2 megapixel camera three years ago and still love it. I've taken over 10,000 pictures with it and I shudder to think what that would have cost me in 35mm format. I've already made plans to buy a Canon 5 megapixel replacement next month, at a cost less than what I paid for the old one. They have more features for the cost than other makes. But I also still use my Minolta 35mm, when I need high quality pics.

Some things to remember about digital photos - Save them in raw uncompressed format. Compression loses quality, and you can always use software to compress copies from the originals. Also, store multiple copies on DVDR or CDR disks as well as on your computer. I've heard lots of stories of crashed hard drives and lost pictures. And not all DVD and CD media are equal quality - some can lose your data, so do at least two copies on different types. Stay away from those stick-on round printed labels - the chemicals in the adhesive can leach down into the DVD or CD media and lose data (okay on copies, not okay on your only original). Have fun!

[Psycho_Runner]

"Save them in raw uncompressed format."

I have been told of this. TIFF Files are typically the best format. JPEG is the worst as each time you open the file and save it the JPEG will continually compress data. Kinda like compressing the compressed and so forth.

[Polybius]

Right now, I've got a Sony Mavica CD-1000 that I bought used, and really like it, but it's only 2.1 MP, and for all intents and purposes, it's a point and shoot camera, with minimal controls. I'd like something in the 5 MP range with full manual control.

I've been pretty happy with the Minolta DiMAGE 7i .

The lens has a focal length equivalent range from 28mm to 200mm (with the digital croppping you get the 400mm effect.) Settings are Aperture preferred , Shutter-speed preferred , full Manual control and full Program mode. It has average weighted and spot metering.

It is a power hog but that problem is solved by getting a Digipower DPS9000 rechargeable battery pack.

[July 4th]

NOW Sony has an 8 mexapixal on the market!

Yeah, and it's pretty much a piece of crap. The CCD noise and chromatic aberrations are pretty bad. The new Canon Digital Rebel (based on a CMOS sensor, not the CCD) is only 6 megapixel, and takes far better pictures. And a clean 6 megapixel image can be "blown up" to at least an 8.5 x 11" print and have it look the same as a regular film picture. The technology gets better all of the time.

[Sunnyvale CA Eng.]

Every time I look at my bread machine, I wonder why nobody has tried to build and market a film development device.

It certainly could be done but I doubt there is a significant market for one. It would be a hard sell to all but a few percent of the picture taking population. Even if you could make it half the size of a toaster people would still go for the memory stick that is half the size of a book of matches. There are several design issues (as mentioned in a post above) regarding chemicals, disposal, maintenance that might be required..etc. While the resolution and contrast may still be better from film images it's still a hard sell.

Look at the advances in digital photography in the past 10 years - I remember buying one of the first consumer digital cameras for PC's in '93 - no memory sticks yet, if I recall correctly. It had a serial port connection to download the black and white images from onboard memory and the resolution was poor. Kodak has been making high resolution CCD cameras for a long time for the industrial market. They had developed megapixel CCD's long ago but they cost a small fortune. It will be interesting to see if Kodak can make the transition to being primarily an electronics manufacturer from primarily a film and chemical company.

[Johnny_Cipher]

If I had come up with that idea 10 years ago, I might have had something. Oh well.

[HAL9000]

Kodak is not American!

Yes it is. Kodak is headquartered in Rochester, New York USA.

They hire based on race.

Are you aware that the race-based hiring problem is far worse in Japan than the United States?

[js1138]

Digicams, in 10 yrs, will be indistiguishable from film.

Except that digital images will be correctly exposed, even by rank amateurs.

My daughter just got married, and we covered the wedding with film and digital. I'm still waiting for the film, but in the meantime we have about two thousand digital images, three hundred of which are running on a screen saver slide show.

The first thing you need to take attractive digital images is to get a camera like some of the Nikons, that go to ISO 800. Then permanently disable the flash. A fuzzy available light picture is a thousand times more attractive than a straight-on flash picture.

I took a number of posed shots with my Nikon TTL bounce flash and a 2 megapixel Nikon camera. Of course the don't have the resolution of Kodachrome, but I was lucky to have a low white ceiling and a solid black background. I will hold them up to any comparable shots by professionals in their visual interest. They look absolutely sharp on the computer screen, which is where they live.

Resolution is not the end of photography. The ability to work quickly, get things in focus and correctly exposed, are paramount in family photography. That and taking lots of images to get a number of good ones. With digital you can cover an event with a thousand images and get fifty really good ones.

[Fledermaus]

My 6.5 megapixels do fine if I set the resolution high enough.

And with software like PhotoShop and others I can make the pictures clearer or better and then print them. But I don't bother since my entire family is on the computer and the internet and look at my photos online and save them on their system and they look good.

You can even bring in background light with the software.

It's getting better and better all the time. Besides, most of my 35mm shots came back grainy or dark, etc. And they are expensive to develop.

[Fledermaus]

I bought a Sony digital back in August of 2000 for $650.

I took it on a two week vacation driving around New England and took some great shots. I computed the cost of all the pictures I took (over 500) in film development and that cost was over $300.

Since then I've taken thousands of great photos that look fantastic on the computer (I don't need prints and my entire family has computers) and have more than paid for the camera cost (plus a new battery with longer time and the regular diskettes it uses - a whopping $20) if I had used a camera and film.

And my film pictures never came out so great. I never bought a fancy 35mm...usually some cheap Minolta camera for $200. It broke and I just started using those disposables which seemed to work and which Kodak will still make and sell.

[Fledermaus]

(Sambo's Restaurants)

That was Lil' Black Sambo's first! lol

And didn't they turn into Shoneys?

[Fledermaus]

I have a Sony Mavica MVC-FD85 at 1.3 megapixels and it has all kinds of features.

I love to experiment with them.

I even got some good shots of the last lunar eclipse with it.

[js1138]

Singer, KLH, Acoustic Research, Advent, Carver, Fisher, Dynaco

[Fledermaus]

My 6.5 megapixels do fine if I set the resolution high enough.

Correction: it's 1.3 megapixels (but still looks great)...it's 6.5X zoom.

[js1138]

I bought my Canon 2 megapixel camera

I've seen stunning stapshots taken with a 1 megapixel Nikon 900. That's enough resolution to fill a computer screen with no enlargement or visible pixels. All the resolution in the world won't help you if the content sucks. With digital you can afford to take a lot of "wasted" shots. For anyone who is motivated to learn, the learning curve is faster, because you take more pictures and see them sooner.

[luvbach1]

Fully agree film cameras are on the way out. However, transitioning to all digital potography will take a bit longer than that of VCR tapes and audio cassettes to digital disks, partly becuse of the significant investment in still-fine-performing high-end film cameras.