At 08:36 PM 4/21/2005, Jeff Keller wrote:
>I guess I never paid enough attention ... I would have thought VHS
>camcorders would have eaten heavily into film sales, but nobody says
>anything about that.
Camcorders have been perceived as just that . . . a significantly better
replacement for the 8mm home movie . . . which never had a sizeable
market. There are a host of reasons for the success of the camcorder with
consumers (versus quite mediocre acceptance of 8mm and super-8mm cinema) .
. . ability to playback immediately on the Living Room Cyclops with near
zero setup likely being one of the biggest of them. I don't know of anyone
who used them routinely for still photographs although one could extract a
still image from them (if that's what you were hinting at).
>If Kodak missed an opportunity it was missing ink jet printers. It fits
>their previous model of selling consumables rather than the equipment. If
>they had jumped into first place there, the shift to digital cameras may
>not have been as important.
First . . .
Kodak has made some good lab equipment . . . but that is a very, very small
segment of their revenue stream in spite of comparatively enormous capital
costs per machine. It's not as if all their equipment has been mediocre as
with the bulk of their consumer still cameras.
I do believe you hit on it . . . their real products have been consumable
image recording products and everything else has been created to support
them . . . starting with the Eastman dry plates and moving into their
single biggest creative innovation . . . practical roll film . . . much of
the earliest product being designed to easily replace the dry plates in
cameras that used them. The huge success of the original Kodak [camera]
was a result of there being nothing else on the market for the
consumer. They've tried to repeat that with "Model T" Everyman cameras and
keep missing the point that there's been stiff competition for the camera
segment ever since. There are numerous consumables associated with
digital. I believe this is where Kodak missed the boat with the emerging
digital market and has been trying to catch up ever since. They are
suffering what the Swiss mechanical watchmakers did when quartz watches
stormed the market from the Japanese (note that mechanical watches have
survived and not just Rolex, Omega, Breitling, etc., there are decent
inexpensive consumer ones at the $100 price point). That said, their
camera making has been quite tenuous for a long time . . . with all their
eggs in the more than rickety APS basket . . . and the bite digital has
taken out of the market likely pushed it over the edge.
I do find it interesting that the digital market is flattening . . . and I
expected market saturation to start showing. The *average* Joe Consumer
will not accept replacing a camera every couple years. The same thing
happened with consumer SLR's, and the general business model for them also
tried to accelerate the product life cycle . . . perhaps not quite as
aggressively . . . but it still found considerable resistance in the
marketplace. Within this list we have a very large number of "Early
Adopters" and "Technology Chasers" compared to the mainstream consumer
marketplace . . . this Luddite who still exclusively uses film in 20-50
year old gear being one of the counter-weights on the list.
-- John Lind
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