Kodak EasyShare

» see kodak.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

EasyShare was a whole product line, but the thing it was actually selling was one step in a workflow. In 2001, getting a photo off a digital camera meant a driver disk and a cable, and software that would either see the camera or not. Kodak sold you a plastic dock that stayed plugged into the computer. You set the camera into it and pressed the button on the front, and the pictures came across while the battery charged.

The first ones were the DX3600 and DX3500 in 2001, with the EasyShare Camera Dock as the piece that carried the name. Over the next decade the name spread off the cameras and onto printer docks and inkjet all-in-ones, along with the desktop software that tied the whole thing together. Kodak had understood something the camera companies had not, which was that the hard part of consumer digital photography was never the sensor.

Kodak in Turkey meant the paper envelope and the shop counter with the film logo on the awning, and it kept meaning that long after the film had gone. When I finally bought a digital camera, Kodak was a name from the developing shop rather than a camera brand, and the shortlist was Japanese without me thinking about why. Being the company that made photography easy for a hundred years turned out to be poor preparation for being the company that made a camera you would choose in 2006.

~ the record ~

~ the dock ~

The dock is the part worth remembering because it solved a real problem and then the problem stopped existing. Card readers got cheap and got built into laptops. Windows learned to mount a camera as a drive without asking anyone. By around 2007 the single-button transfer that had been the entire reason to pay extra for a Kodak was something every camera did with a cable that came in the box.

Kodak kept selling the docks for years after that, and kept putting the word EasyShare on the boxes of cameras whose easy part had become standard equipment on everything else in the shop.

~ what actually killed it ~

The usual story is that Kodak missed digital, which is not what happened. Kodak invented the digital camera in 1975 and sold tens of millions of them under this brand. What it missed was that the camera would stop being a separate object you carried. Once the phone had a decent sensor the compact camera market evaporated inside about four years, and Kodak was sitting in the middle of it with a printing business attached.

Chapter 11 came on 19 January 2012. On 9 February the company announced it was exiting dedicated capture devices altogether, the category that held its digital cameras and its pocket camcorders, with the phase-out to run through the first half of the year. The consumer business would be photo printing from then on. Kodak put the annual savings at over a hundred million dollars and took a thirty million dollar charge for the layoffs.

~ what still turns on ~

EasyShare cameras are unkillable in the way cheap electronics from that era often are. They run off AA batteries and write to SD cards, and the four-megapixel files they produce look exactly like 2004 in a way no filter has managed to fake. They turn up in charity shops for the price of a coffee and get bought by people who were not born when they shipped.

The photo-printing site that Kodak kept instead carried the EasyShare name for a few years too, as Kodak EasyShare Gallery, before it was shortened to Kodak Gallery. It outlived the cameras by five months.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »