Kodak's new little black media player.
(Credit: Kodak)I'm not sure whether I should call the new Theatre HD Player Kodak's answer to Apple TV, but that's the best analogy I can come up with on short notice. Whether it is or not, Kodak is doing its best to get into your living room with a little Wi-Fi-enabled black box that connects to your HDTV, displays images and other multimedia content, and links directly to Kodak Gallery, the company's online photo-sharing service, and Flickr. Due to roll out in September, the Theatre HD Player will retail for $299.99 and continue to add features through firmware upgrades after it's launched.
Kodak calls the Theatre HD Player, "An interactive device displaying personal content--pictures, video, podcasts, music--and Web-based content on a HDTV, while wirelessly connecting to a household's private Wi-Fi network." In a nod to the Nintendo Wii's popularity, Kodak includes gyroscopic remote, and you navigate the onscreen menus much like you would with the Wiimote. Like Apple, Kodak has an alliance with YouTube for video content. RadioTime is onboard for streaming audio.
The Theatre HD Player's connectivity options.
(Credit: Kodak)In its press release, Kodak notes that the "Theatre HD Player lets consumers relive their favorite, and even forgotten, memories in customized slide shows, incorporating their personal music and video collections, Internet Radio, plus online video- and photo-sharing sites. Consumers can also edit and upload images and videos to popular online content sharing sites on their HDTV from the comfort of their living room." It's able to display high-resolution still images in a 16:9 aspect ratio and 720p video through it's HDMI and component video connections.
I got a look at the unit last night at an event for the product's unveiling (along with a few other Kodak products) and thought it had some nice features and an elegant menu system. There's some promise here. However, the Theatre HD Player is going to pose a marketing challenge for Kodak. Company reps seemed to shrug off the fact that the little black box's price tag approaches that of the Playstation 3, which not only has built-in memory card slots (and a hard drive), a good photo viewing application, and the ability to play back music and video files from your computer, but there's that built-in Blu-ray player--and oh, it plays games and has a Web browser. In my humble opinion, this device needs to cost less than $200 and probably closer to $150 to be viable. Of course, I keep telling Apple TV reps the same thing about their device, but that hasn't seemed to have had much of an impact.
Anybody interested in buying this thing? And, at what price? Or would you rather go for Apple TV or a PS3 for that matter?
Sometimes, you get a press release that's so accidentally, astonishingly funny that you can't stop laughing long enough to make fun of it. This morning's latte-through-the-nose nominee is the deadpan announcement "Kodak Names Chief Blogger: Company Extends its Revolutionary Approach to Product Innovation with Cutting-edge Approach to Social Media."
According to the release, "Just over 10 percent of Fortune 500 companies have public blogs. Fewer still have Chief Bloggers, and Kodak is among the first to name a female Chief Blogger." Wow. I had thought that writing, customer service, and public relations jobs were chock full 'o women, but now I discover that Chief Blogger was a job title heretofore out of my chromosomal reach. So much more rewarding than CTO or CFO.
Now, there are lots of corporate blogs and bloggers out there (can I officially coin the terms "clog" and "clogger"?), some of whom I even read, like Adobe's John Nack. But really, once you've appointed an official blogging overlord and publicly announce it just to impress Wall Street analysts, blogs take on all the glamour and interest of CRM.
Eastman Kodak didn't really miss the digital wave.
In fact, it dipped its toes into digital relatively early on. One of the issues with Kodak's Photo CD effort wasn't that it was late to the digital photography game, but that the market wasn't ready to widely embrace photos in a digital form yet.
One can, of course, fairly fault Kodak for allowing itself to be pushed further and further toward the periphery of the photographic ecosystem as digital imaging grew in importance. However, as I've discussed previously, the bigger issue is that digital photography has vastly eroded Kodak's consumables business. You sell a camera once. You sell film and processing week in and week out.
Thus, this piece by Claudia H. Deutsch in the New York Times caught my eye. It discusses some of Kodak President and COO Philip Faraci's growth strategies.
Kodak is benefiting from the moves that some publishers are making to recoup at least some of those lost advertising dollars. He notes that the Chicago Tribune and some others are trying "microzoning"--printing several versions of the paper in the same city, each with ads aimed at a specific neighborhood. And, he said, newspapers all over are using more color.
All of that, he said, promises to yield increased sales of Kodak's high-speed production printers--particularly of the 1,600-page-per-minute printer Kodak is about to introduce. And far more important to the company, the trend can yield a steady stream of orders for inks and other highly profitable consumables.
Faraci was named president and COO last fall; he joined the company in 2004.
What's really interesting here is that Faraci was at Hewlett-Packard for 22 years where, among other roles, he was senior vice president and general manager for the Inkjet Imaging Solutions Group. This is someone who knows consumables.
Maybe Kodak is starting to find a revenue and profit replacement for film, which is what it's always really needed rather than more amorphous "digital imaging products."
Flash memory cards, along with digital cameras, sounded the death knell for traditional film cameras and dealt a serious blow to companies like Kodak and Fuji that depended on that industry.
So it's ironic that Kodak was one of the two companies that commissioned the CompactFlash card. (Canon was the other.) The format, coined in 1994, was the first successful flash card. Kodak had made a digital camera but the storage device inside of it made the camera big and bulky. The company, along with Canon, then commissioned SanDisk to come up with something smaller. The CompactFlash card was the result, way back in the '90s, according to SanDisk CEO Eli Harari.
Ultimately, Casio, not Kodak, had the first commercial success with digital cameras and many other companies, but not Kodak, made piles of money on flash cards. Kodak tried to do its own branded memory cards too, but was late.
"They had it all," Harari said.
Eastman Kodak just sold its first CMOS image sensor for digital cameras. The customer? Eastman Kodak.
OK, that's being a little flippant. Kodak's camera division is separate from its sensor division, and the latter must compete with other suppliers for the camera business, so the deal is a significant achievement in the company's attempt to transform its sensor business.
Kodak will use its new KAC-05011 sensor in the new Easyshare C513, a $99 model with a 3X optical zoom lens and 2.4-inch LCD screen. It's due to ship this month, Kodak plans to announce Tuesday.
CMOS, which stands for complementary metal oxide semiconductor, is the ordinary process by which computer processors and memory are made. Most digital camera sensors today are built with the more specialized CCD, or charge-coupled device, technology.
Kodak's sensor group builds its own CCD products, but it's begun a parallel effort to design CMOS sensors built by IBM and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp. (TSMC). Selling the CMOS sensor--a 5-megapixel model the company promised earlier this year--is a milestone indicating Kodak has attained a certain level of expertise.
All things being equal, a CMOS sensor costs somewhere between 5 and 15 percent less to build than a CCD sensor, but Kodak is interested in the CMOS market more because it also can incorporate some processing tasks, said Michael DeLuca, Kodak's marketing manager for image sensors. For example, it can incorporate circuitry for basic sensor functions such as analog-to-digital conversion or chip timing, he said. And in the longer run, it could house circuitry for reconstructing full-color images from sensors using Kodak's new color filter patterns.
Ultimately, CMOS will likely replace CCD in some product categories, DeLuca predicted.
"For mass-market consumer products, it's probably a question of time," he said.
CMOS sensors are widely used in mobile phone cameras but are less common elsewhere in the digital camera market. The most notable example is Canon, which uses CMOS sensors in its SLR cameras--including some "full-frame" 36-by-24mm ones that are very large by digital camera standards.
The company also has said the sensor will be used in mobile phones.
Yahoo Photos will be shut down in 99 days for some users, but Yahoo released tools Wednesday to let members move their pictures to alternative sites.
Yahoo Photos members now can migrate their pictures elsewhere.
(Credit: Yahoo)In a blog posting Wednesday, Tim Anderson, the senior product manager of Yahoo Photos and Flickr, encouraged the Yahoo Photos users to move their photos to Yahoo's other photo site, Flickr. But the company also will let members move their photos to four other sites: Snapfish, Shutterfly, Photobucket and Kodak Gallery.
Look at the options carefully before you switch. Some are offering perks such as free prints, and others don't support some Yahoo Photos features such as tags. And don't be in a rush: The site won't shut down until September 20, and international users likely will get even more leeway.
Conspicuously missing from the migration list is Picasa, the photo-sharing site run by Yahoo archrival Google.
The site was misbehaving on Wednesday evening. When I tried to move my photos, I got an error message: "Wait! There's a problem. We're sorry about this, but we couldn't start your migration for a very technical reason that you probably don't want to know."
Members also can buy archival CDs--which might not be a bad idea no matter in any event given that most folks are backup shirkers.
"We've watched photography gradually change from a tool for simply recording life events (seen enough baby/wedding/graduation/vacation photos, anyone?) to a social tool for sharing and connecting with others. That's why we believe it's time to shift our focus towards Flickr," Anderson said.
Kodak's Z1275 with 2.5-inch LCD screen
(Credit: Eastman Kodak)In addition to its new M series of budget compact cameras, Kodak announced an ultrazoom compact and a high-megapixel compact for its Z series line of digital cameras on Tuesday.
Both cameras, set to be available this August for about $249, have Kodak's digital-image stabilization feature to assist with camera shake.
Kodak's Z1275 offers an impressive 12 megapixels for $249. (In this price range, 10 megapixels is on the better side of average.)
The Z1275 has a 2.5-inch LCD screen and will stitch together photos for one panoramic, a fun feature to have on board. It also has 64MB of internal memory in addition to an SDHC/SD/MMC card slot.
Kodak's ZD710
(Credit: Eastman Kodak)For what it's worth, Kodak claims that this camera has an ISO sensitivity of up to 1,600, with a 3,200 boost, depending on which mode you are shooting in and the size of the photo.
The ZD710, as the name and body suggests, is the obvious predecessor to the Kodak Z710 as it also has a 10x optical-zoom lens that offers the 38mm to 380mm (35mm equivalent) range.
Unlike the Z710, however, which we at CNET complained had no optical image stabilization and an ISO of only 400 with an 800 boost, the new ZD710 does have Kodak's digital-image stabilization and offers an ISO up to 1,600.
While digital-image stabilization is not the same as optical-image stabilization, it's a start.
Kodak's ZD710 with 2-inch LCD screen
(Credit: Eastman Kodak)The ZD710 also comes with the typical SDHC/SD/MMC memory card slot, scene modes, color modes, video capability and shooting modes for partial manual control typical of a camera in this class.
As is the problem on many of these cameras caught between the compact and dSLR worlds, the ZD710 has only a 2-inch LCD screen in order to fit in a control wheel.
While the rumor mill surrounding a new Nikon release for DSLR consumers "hots up," as the British press would say, Kodak is addressing its amateur photographer base.
The new M-series budget-priced compact cameras offer color choice, portability, nice LCD screen size and megapixels high enough to make 30x40 inch prints.
Kodak's M753 in copper
(Credit: Eastman Kodak)Notably, these are not the cameras and cell phones with Kodak's own CMOS chips that Kodak President Antonio Perez mentioned we would soon see. Those 5-megapixel cameras are due to come out "in time for the holiday season."
The M753 available now for $149 is a 7-megapixel 0.9-inch slim camera with a 2.5-inch LCD screen and SD/MMC slot that comes in color choices of black, silver, purple, copper, pink and blue. It's counterpart, the 8-megapixel M853, will be available in August for about $179. Also with a 2.5-inch LCD screen, the M853 comes in white, red, graphite, silver and espresso. Both have a 3x optical zoom lens.
Kodak's M883 in red
(Credit: Eastman Kodak)For a little more, you can get a compact camera with a 3-inch LCD screen (go for it) and face detection technology with your 8 megapixels in the M883. It'll be available for $229 this September in silver, black or red. Not willing to pay the extra $30 for a bigger screen and face detection? There's the 8-megapixel M873 for $199 that also comes in a metal alloy body in silver or black. Sorry, no red.
BOSTON, Mass.--Eastman Kodak plans to release its own CMOS sensor in a Kodak camera and several Motorola cell phones by the end of the year.
Kodak President Antonio Perez shared the info at the JPMorgan Technology Conference in Boston on Monday.
While Perez would not release details on the camera phone, he did say that the new Kodak camera would have a Kodak-developed CMOS chip and be a 5-megapixel camera. The Kodak CMOS camera will be released in time for the holiday season and the Motorola-Kodak camera phone with a Kodak CMOS chip will follow close behind.
Kodak has been known to be developing a CMOS sensor with technology from IBM.
"Our CMOS sensors have been well advancing for many years. And now we will have the ability to embed the sensor in the phone with all the richness we have with our imaging software. It will allow us to make the sensor, the most important part of the camera, able to manage the light, color, and the like," said Perez.
Perez also said that Kodak plans to phase out its lower lines of digital cameras.
"We're going to be abandoning the low-end of the digital camera business. As everyone knows, we're not making much money there. Now we have our own CMOS sensors, so you might see us going down in price because we can make money," said Perez.
Digital camera shipments increased 6 percent to 4.9 million in the first quarter of 2007, market researcher IDC said Wednesday.
Top leaders were Canon at 21 percent of the market, Sony at 16 percent and Kodak at 13 percent. Samsung jumped from 4 percent in the year-earlier quarter to 11 percent this year, propelling it to a fourth-place finish, IDC said.
Kodak fared better, with shipments increasing 5 percent--the first growth in five quarters, attributable to its emphasis on compact cameras costing between $200 and $300, IDC said. Nikon, though, didn't fare as well.
"Nikon was seventh with a share of 7 percent, down from 13 percent a year ago," said IDC analyst Christopher Chute. "They did well with DSLRs (digital single-lens reflex cameras), but not so well with compacts."
