Collie lover Loc: St. Louis, MO

And Kodak, which set the standard for many years, went out of business because it didn't produce a digital camera that people could use.

amfoto1 Loc: San Jose, Calif. USA

Kodak made a lot of dumb decisions and went down a lot of dead ends... Probably were pretty resistant to digital in general as their business at the time was so heavily entrenched in films and chemistry!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodak_DCS has a brief history of the Kodak DCS series built on modified Nikon, Canon and Sigma SLRs... as well as for some medium format cameras. There are links there to individual model pages.

If I recall correctly, the Canon D30 introduced in 2000 was marketed as the first DSLR offered for under $3000 US (body only, $2999). The 10D (2003) was the first to sell for under $2000 (body only, $1999). And the Digital Rebel/Kiss/300D was the first under $1000 ($899 body only, $999 with 18-55mm kit lens which was the first EF-S lens, announced along with the camera).

LFingar Loc: Claverack, NY

Starting in 2001, my first three digital cameras were Kodaks. I still have the 2nd one around here someplace, a 5mp DX7590. All three were easy to use and took nice photos. I don't know how they compared to the competition at the time, but I liked them. Might still be using them if I hadn't gotten the DSLR bug in 2012. Hated to see Kodak self destruct. Back in the '70's, during my trucking days, I hauled a lot of "pearl" into Rochester. Pearl is a rendering from cattle remains. It is the base material used in making film. It's also used in making glue and Jello! Keep that in mind the next time you have dessert!

hcmcdole

Back in 1998-1999, I thought digital cameras were a kid's toy compared to a good 35mm film camera. When a couple techs at the power plant back in 1999 were using the 1.3 MP Sony Mavica with a 3.5 inch floppy drive to take pictures of our project, I thought they had to do something with their new toy to justify the high cost, so I kind of made fun of it. They said that even wedding photographers were using it so I had to go see how serious digital cameras were becoming. When I bought my first digital camera (Kodak) late 1999, I never shot film again but was still in the frame of mind not to waste "electronic film" so only took photos of things I thought might be good. It took a few years to get out of that frame of mind.

The first card reader (Sandisk) was a complicated mess where I had to put a Y cable between the keyboard and the reader for power and also use the parallel printer port to read the data in. Talk about complicated!! It was selling for $100 a year earlier so I felt lucky getting it for less than $70. The good old days? Hardly. But the times were changing... Seems like Kodak helped create their own demise? The memory card that came with my first camera was an 8MB CF - I bought a 32 MB after that to insure lots of memory (HAHA). About 3 years later I bought a Nikon 5700 (5 MP and supposedly a 7X optical) for a mere $100 more than the Kodak (2MP and 2X optical zoom). I also bought a Lexar 256MB CF card for it for $100 and thought the prices would not get much better than this. Was I ever wrong.

lukevaliant Loc: gloucester city,n. j.

1st dig camera was 1957

Photocraig

It is called Group Think. I has plagued Corporate America and Corporate and Government Europe like Political Correctness has plagued Academia "journalism" (lower case intended) and Politics since the end of WWII. The PC statement of the last century ( Between President Truman and Gen Mac Arthur and Admiral Nimitz) was that Washington thought there was actually a clean end of a tu*d by which to pick it up and examine it. Perhaps to find a new way to describe it as something else.

Kodak could, all by itself, supply enough case studies for Engineering, Finance and Marketing Doctorate studies from the sublime successes to narrow catastrophic thinking over it's Century of innovation and ultimately NOT.
Sad. I opened a lot of Yellow Boxes!

BudsOwl Loc: Upstate NY and New England

And for those of you who might be interested. Steve Sasson was a graduate of Rensselaer Polytechnical Institute, and I believe was elected to the RPI hall of fame (I am not home so can't check my records).
Bud (RPI class of '52)

Hal81 Loc: Bucks County, Pa.

I think Kodak went on the shelf along with the butter churn.

dickwilber Loc: Indiana (currently)

I have been of the opinion that Kodak was less a victim of poor foresight and more of size. In addition to having used Kodak products for half a century, I had the opportunity to sell them specialized construction services in the eighties, and be their client when I owned a photo studio and lab in the mid nineties. (During the eighties, they were oh so proud of their latest, those APC mini cameras with their silly little flash cubes.) But, in the mid-nineties, I received a great deal of help from their sales agent as he pointed to ways to get ahead of the digital revolution we were heading into. (Alas, he did not point to where the financing could come from.)

A few years later a friend was doing very well as a wedding photographer, shooting exclusively with Kodak-Nikon digital cameras, which were well ahead of the competition (except the very similar Kodak-Canon offerings). No, I believe Kodak judged the future of digital imaging fairly well, but had so much tied up in industrial chemicals and films, which quickly became obsolete, do to many causes, particularly digital imaging. Kodak had the right idea, but they were just too large, too invested in the chemistry side, to successfully make the jump to the new technology. I've always been amazed at how well Fuji made the transition, but I suspect that if you looked hard, Fuji is not now as large and robust as it once was. (But I could be wrong.)

Boentgru Loc: Boston, Massachusetts, USA

A colleague at Perkin-Elmer made a digital camera, for the military, before then. It has a one pixel photo sensor and scanned the image to produce the photo field.