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Alan, I think the grand connection is that for some of us, Kodak was a symbol of what US sci & tech innovation was... and should be. My other blog rant was that companies like Apple and Google and FB don't seem to be producing many jobs... yet if you ask most young kids where they'd like to work, guess what they pick. Usually not anything at all involved with making real stuff! So for some of us, this is all a big interconnected problem that starts with education.
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I read your blog recently on Apple and I concur,just having a little fun.I don't have any answers to the whole kodak thing,I just use their film.Strangely enough I've started using more of it recently.Subliminal I suppose.
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 Originally Posted by Alan W
I don't have any answers to the whole kodak thing,I just use their film.Strangely enough I've started using more of it recently.Subliminal I suppose.
Indeed it seems this chapter 11 thing is by far their most successful marketing ploy of late...! Maybe they should have announced they were going to stop doing digital about 10 years ago...
Polaroid products had a similar dead cat bounce.
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Interestingly enough, Kodak rather disdained military experience. Most former military people were rather looked down on. I found that out rather quickly.
PE
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Originally Posted by Photo Engineer
Interestingly enough, Kodak rather disdained military experience. Most former military people were rather looked down on.
Really? Bizarre. I would guess that pretty much anybody with photographic knowledge was pressed into some form of military service. Jack (J.W.) Mitchell, who did a lot to advance the theory of the latent image, made some pretty important contributions to high speed photography during the war. I recall that they wanted to figure out how to make better armor and needed to see what was happening when projectiles made impact.
Then again, Jack did grumble quite a lot about Kodak but I always assumed it was about theoretical differences. He told me they willingly dropped the ball on more sensitive emulsions.
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Yes, it is true unless one worked in one of the government contract divisions.
PE
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Originally Posted by Photo Engineer
Interestingly enough, Kodak rather disdained military experience. Most former military people were rather looked down on. I found that out rather quickly.
PE
I remember attending an industrial recruitment seminar quite some years ago....there seemed to be a feeling that the regulated military environment didn't encourage initiative and responsibility when people tried to move into civilian and commercial employments.
Though for good training in many areas, particularly engineering, the military training was top class, and military experience in specialist fields was sought after.
(Not saying I agreed...in fact, can't remember now why I was at the seminar!!!)
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A bit oblique to this topic - but the Kodak r&d connection to the military etc has always intrigued me, esp with respect to film mfg. Several times over the years I have seen classified color shots which were technically far superior to anything commercially marketed during those same years. I'm aware of some of the lens distinctions
because there was a contractor for those locally (and 75 to 100K per lens would buy something pretty unusual).
Lots of question about the optics remaining, however. But I've always tended to believe my brother's old hypothesis, that classified espionage films tended to be a couple of decades ahead of commercially available fim.
Now satellite imagery has taken over to some extent; and I've seen many commercial aerial photographs from the past, like the kind the USGS used for mapmaking. Maybe a new paperback? : "Smiley's People Sneak Into
Kodak Unnoticed"; or perhaps more realistically today, "Austin Powers Sabotages Kodak's Market Shares".
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Drew;
Kodak cameras made for the military were the best in the world. No one could beat them and only the government could afford them. We had a talk once and in it, a particular comparison was made between a Nikon F with a 50 mm lens and a Kodak military camera of very superior quality. The camera and lens, in the 70s, would have cost over $10,000! That was about 10x the Nikon.
And, having taken Kodak and USAF "management" and "planning" courses, I found that the AF was using methods in the 50s that Kodak did not even think of using until the 70s or 80s. Military management was far superior and it showed up in some of the recent military "projects". The military is not perfect, but from my POV they were superior in some ways to EK and acted more swiftly to change. Kodak was slow and stodgy. Their estimates placed digital as becoming important vs film in 2020. I argued against this BTW and was shouted down by my boss! Kodak also misestimated the cost of bulk CDs and DVDs by about a factor of 10, and thus they overpriced them.
PE
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