George Eastman - Where Are You When We Need You

George Eastman
(courtesy infosociety.com) 

There are eras and then there are eras.  One of the latter has come to an end as, apparently, the Great Yellow Father’s suicide note prophesized…”My work is done, why wait?”

George Eastman’s short note speaks volumes about Eastman Kodak and its role in imaging today.

Here was a company continually on the cutting edge.  Partly through shrewd vision on the part of its founder and his successors and partly from being pushed by industry demands, Kodak was the crusader for higher quality images.

Under George Eastman and folks like C. Kenneth Mees, films became faster and sharper on a regular basis, almost according to Andy Grove’s law.  Anyone remember the fanfare behind Double-X and 4-X?  (No, that doesn’t refer to adult films that may or not have been made on it).  Tri-X?  Plus-X?  Panatomic-X?  Kodachrome (the last roll of which was recently shot by Steve McCurry.  And, by the way, that wasn’t Kodachrome 10.)  Mr. and Mrs. Ektachrome and all their kids?  Kodacolor and Ektacolor? The C22 and C41 processes that made that made those films possible and put processing everywhere and anywhere, including the basement darkroom.  

And the timing...how about when 5247 and 7247 were introduced? They revolutionized low light motion pictures. Add in 7250 400T for TV newsgathering.  It turned coverage on its head while getting rid of the talking head anchors.  Or the whole CRI (color reversal intermediate) concept that 5249 brought, eliminating one, two, or even three generations between camera negative and release print?

Eastman Kodak brought it all.  And cameras, too.  From the Brownie to Hawkeye on through the Retina series and the Ektra – which made Leitz’ Leica look like a toy in comparison, Kodak led the way.

Unfortunately, the world has changed.  I’m talking about the business world.  Entrepreneurs – the visionaries – get to run a company just long enough for the VC’s to pull the plug on them if they veer off the business plan they funded.  George Eastman probably wouldn’t have made it if he started today.  However, if he were alive  today and still running the company, I’d bet you a bag full of 828 Verichrome Pan it’d be a different operation.

• Eastman probably would have embraced Edwin H. Land and his instant photography process.  Land once said, “It's not that we need new ideas, but we need to stop having old ideas.”  That’s right up Eastman’s alley.  As important, Land also said, “The most important thing about power is to make sure you don't have to use it.”  Maybe the Kodak of recent times should have noted that.  Interesting to note that Kodak did do business with Land and Polaroid, well before Land’s invention of the Polaroid Land camera…but they didn’t embrace the instant photography concept.  At least not until…
• They violated 10 or more major Polaroid patents when they finally did get into the business.  George Eastman would have known his patents inside out and would not have gotten hammered by the Polaroid suit which cost Kodak hundreds of millions of dollars and shut them out of instant photography after they spent other hundreds of millions getting in
• Xerography was known about in the 30’s but the chest-thumpers in Rochester didn’t embrace that, either, choosing to pursue the Verifax photo method of copying instead.  Sad when people tell you there’s another solution out there – that a selenium drum and some carbon can replace silver in imaging – especially when you just bought a bunch of silver mines.
• He would have teamed up with others, as he did with Edison to pursue digital imaging and would have been a leader instead of foundering in right field trying to play catch-up ball.

Kinda hard to do when you have to make the “Q” every three months and stockholders big and small are waving their certificates clamoring for more.  Just as hard when you’re so full of yourself, so arrogant, that you think you’re untouchable.

Remember that little company called Fuji?  Kodak brushed them off until Fuji made significant inroads into both still and professional motion picture photography.  Ilford and Agfa?  Same thing.  Even Ciba and Ansco, known more for their commercial dyes, made inroads though it’s probable that Kodak’s thinking was that keeping them around would keep the anti-trust wolves away.

But Kodak¹ really stepped in it with digital.  You have to ask, was it arrogance?  Did they think that brute force would keep the silver-based imaging world alive?  Relying on Chinon rather than its own development people, Kodak got caught flat-footed as Canon and Nikon sensor development compounded quality.  Over and over Kodak's “new models” were Canon and Nikon's “last year’s.  Consumers – discriminate and non – well, got the picture.  (Pun intended).

On the professional side, Nikon and Canon already had the market saturated with lenses and accessories for its film SLR’s.  It made digital bodies easier to sell.  After all, if you have 4 lenses, an array of filters, bellows or closeup lenses, integrated flash systems and the like, the upgrade to digital was a heckuva lot less than starting from scratch with a camera whose mount wouldn’t accept your current lenses.

Once they stepped in it there wasn’t a road to recovery.  So their reward was the bankruptcy they entered this past week, even though they tried to sell off 1100 (count ‘em!) patents in the digital world.  Sure.  They held a bunch of them.  But they held them too long and the value just wasn’t there. 

And what are they looking at now?  High end ink jet printers.  It’s catch up ball, once again.  I hope they’re successful.  I really do.  A lot folks are in it and Epson’s really good at it.  As for you and me, it’s unlikely we’ll be buying anything with the Kodak logo unless it’s the backprinting on a huge inkjet print we order from someone else.  Maybe Eastman's work really is [finally] done.

¹ It’s nobody’s name.  It’s the sound George Eastman thought the first shutter made.