36 posts tagged “kodak”
For a long time, I've been a proponent of refurbished digital products, such as cameras and accessories. My success rate with recertified products has been pretty high. Although everything seems to be built in China, the rehab work appears to be done by U.S. employees, who earn more in a day than a Chinese assembly worker makes in a week.
Here are a few wins and losses:
- Last year, a factory-refurbished Canon Powershot digital camera (A570is) produced "Outer Limits" images, right out of the box. Blurry, jaggy, like a 1960s Zenith TV. Every other Canon camera I've owned -- new, used, whatever -- worked fine. My verdict: damaged in transit. The retailer gave a full refund.
- Kodak's refurbished digital cameras have proven a good deal. Same one-year warranty as a new model. On the other hand, my very recently acquired new M1033 -- a really cool camera -- mysteriously quit after my last national convention. Kodak has a one-year warranty, so assuming you don't dunk it in the Atlantic Ocean, they'll bring it back to life. Or serve up a refurb that will keep me happy.
- My Nikon D50 digital SLR is a factory refurb. It's never let me down. The 55-200mm lens I bought for it quit during a shoot last summer; Nikon replaced it.
- The Fuji F31fd compact digital camera I bought for low-light point-and-shooting is a refurb. It's a winner. I may have landed the last one; Fuji doesn't sell them on their refurb site anymore.
- Olympus FE-290 camera: works fine, but it's nothing extraordinary. A good deal if you want a wide-angle lens in a compact camera.
- Apple iPods: hard to tell. They didn't refurbish my original Gen. 5 iPod, but they sent me a refurbished 30GB iPod that seems to work fine. Verdict: iPods get more abuse than just about any other digital product, so buy the extended warranty.
- Kodak AiO printers: I really like the new printers. Aside from the cool, jet-black makeover they've received, they can read 4GB SDHC memory cards that my old card reader can't. But the refurb I bought from Woot.com arrived with a bad print head. I've replaced the printhead, and it works OK.
(Does it look like Kodak hired Darth Vader to design its new cameras and printers? Very Dark Side, it seems.)
So, my verdict is: big-name manufacturers seem to get refurbishing their products right, most of the time. But I would verify the length of the warranty that the maker offers with the refurb, just in case.
This time of year, our NASCAR friends visit Rochester. Actually, they visit Watkins Glen, where the Sprint Cars do their road-racing thing. Lots of transmissions die out on that twisty track.
But Rochester's the nearest large-ish city to the Glen, so Kodak's show car and driver stopped by. The highlight locally was a "Kodak Night" at Frontier Field, our local AAA baseball affiliate's stadium.
Kodak and Universal Pictures did a promotional deal around the new Mummy movie with a special paint job on the Kodak Dodge. This would be impressive at your local Dairy Queen, if you could get an 800-hp car to stop in the drive-thru.
We saw the movie Thursday night. If you want to see absolutely every gimmick from the first three Indiana Jones movies rolled into a movie with Brendan Fraser, go see the Mummy III.
Back to the ballpark:
BK and CK.
Your humble author and CK. JK was not in a hammy mood last night, and I'm not about to post scowly photos.
Did I mention there was a ball game going on? Ryan Newman threw out the first pitch, signed autographs, then headed back for the Glen and his weekend of racing. Save the transmissions!
That's Oscar, as in "red carpets, acceptance speeches, and Best Actor" Oscar.
Here's what happened: I borrowed one of my employer's Academy AwardsTM for a business function one Saturday evening. Guests got a chance to pose for a portrait with a genuine Oscar. (Kodak's won nine of these guys for all its innovations in the motion picture sciences. Read the full story here.)
There are just two rules when we take Oscar to a party:
- You can't touch or hold the Oscar. If you do, I have to taser you.
- OK, you can hold the Oscar -- but ONLY if you wear white cotton gloves. No gloves, no Oscar. Turns out Oscar reacts badly to those oils in our skin.
So Oscar came to our house for an evening. This meant we all had a chance to pose -- with our white gloves, natch -- with a genuine Oscar. B found an excuse to dress up, while Us Guys decided to go casual.
As for the Oscar? He travels in bubble wrap and a soft-sided cooler. Good thing, too -- he weighs about eight pounds.
The taser's optional.
Now live on YouTube, and on the Kodak podcast site: our newest conversation with photographer Jeff Liao.
Look for his book, Habitat Seven.
Among other projects, he's chronicling the construction of New York City's new Citi Field. And the upcoming demolition of Shea Stadium, where I met Bud Harrelson back in 1968 -- the year before The Miracle.
I've been busy the past few days.
We tricked out one of the Airstream trailers featured in the Celebrity Apprentice with a flotilla of Kodak picture kiosks and new ESP-5 inkjet printers. Lots of people came by to play with our toys.
My guess is, about 3,500 people.
Which would have been fine, except this particular Airstream only has ONE door. So it got a little congested in there. And the student who decided to print out 60 prints (after we informed him of a 20-print limit) didn't help matters.
But it was fun. Next time, I'm going to request a larger Airstream -- with two doors, a lav, and a built-in fridge.
You have to wonder why some people are great leaders, and others think leadership merely means okaying someone's vacation time. (And harassing them afterward for work that didn't get done while I was on vacation.)
As near as I can figure, the best leaders are those that demand hard work, yet coach the employee, while expressing an interest in the people they lead. I knew one former manager's kids' and wife's names, although I'm certain the manager didn't know the names of my family members. And the coaching? Non-existent.
I got to see two sides of great leadership. Antonio Perez, the Kodak CEO, has spent the last four years transforming Kodak from an arrogant, somnolent film company to a digital imaging company that's working to listen to its customers. Lots of jobs went away. Buildings went away. Those weren't easy decisions.
Last Friday, Mr. Perez did something remarkable. He announced that Kodak would step up, after years of cutbacks, and provide $10 million to expand and renovate the Eastman Theatre, a great classic music hall that's home to the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra.
The orchestra, the theatre, the University of Rochester, and its Eastman School of Music all exist because of Kodak's founder, George Eastman. Realizing that his company needed to attract talent to a pseudo-Arctic mill town, Eastman gave incredible amounts of resources to make this town a cultural oasis (even in the dead of winter).
Perez isn't a Rochester native. He's lived all over the world, and spent many years in California.
But he took an interest in this community, and drove the company to re-invest in Rochester after many years of cutbacks. Some former Kodak employees will likely vilify him for it. But committing resources back into this community was long overdue. He did the right thing.
That's leadership. Anyone in Washington listening?
It's time to start divesting. Letting the children go.
I'm starting to sell off some of my collection of cameras. It was fun collecting them in the era when eBay was a big treasure hunt. But, these days, the fees and restrictions and dealing with "will you ship this item to Neptune?" questions has taken all the fun out of eBay.
And, truth is, I'm not shooting much film anymore.
And there are other signs of change. David Ritz used to have camera stores all over the place. Now, there isn't a single one between Buffalo and Syracuse. One in Sarasota just closed. I'm thinking we've made photography as ubiquitous as the pencil (a George Eastman quote) -- but for mostly mixed reasons.
So, if you mosey on over here, you'll find a slow parade of fully functional working collectables under "photo/video". Some are less than a year old. Others, like the Canonet, have appeared in feature films ("Pecker").
My guess is, I'll probably find good homes for a few of these babies. But I won't be opening the Last Camera Store in America, after all.
I wish I hadn't figured this out. But it looks like the truth.
Over-ambitious bloggers are bumping up their hit rates by copying PR material from the camera manufacturers -- or worse, from other sites' ill-informed product reviews.
I don't understand the rationale. If you have something original to add to the world's discourse, I'm all for it. But if the only way you can attract web traffic is by hijacking other people's content, why bother?
It reminds me a bit of the executives who go out and say things like, "We're in this to win." D'uh. What company is in business to tie? Or to lose?
And what's winning, anyway? If you're the best manufacturer of, say, guitars, is your goal to sell the most guitars -- or the best guitars? And if you win, you take market share away from another guitar company. Maybe you do so well that you buy the other company, acquire their brand, fire the U.S. workers, and have the guitars made in Asia with the label of the acquired brand.
Is that winning?
God, I hope not.
Example:
Postscript 1: Vivitar was founded as Ponder & Best, by a couple of California businessmen. They sold some decent aftermarket camera products in the 1970s, including vari-focal lenses and the world's most underrrated rangefinder, the Vivitar 35ES. But they never built their own stuff. Now, Vivitar is owned by a company in Arizona called Syntax-Brillian. That's the company that sources off-brand TVs you may find in Target stores and elsewhere. As a result, I'm pretty certain I'm never going to see a respectable Vivitar photographic product again.
Postscript 2: The camera above is a Vivitar 3800N. It's made in China, comes with a nice zoom lens, and uses film. Takes great pictures. I used it and sold it to a college student. It'll accept just about any Pentax lens you can find. They don't make this camera any more.
Last Sunday, I was blasting north on the interstate toward home, trying desperately not to lose the radio signal from Wayne County. Ryan Newman and Tony Stewart were battling for the lead in the last lap of the Daytona 500. Ryan's our guy; I've interviewed him for a couple of Kodak podcasts, and managed a couple of media moments for him.
Ryan, with an assist from his teammate Kurt Busch, won the race. And Ryan, true to his media training, named our company as one of his top three sponsors as soon as he got out of that race car. Job well done. Congratulations, Ryan.
(Check out the video.)
But, you'd really need to squint to find the Kodak decal on the right rear quarter-panel of his No. 12 Dodge. It's there, but otherwise, the car is painted bright blue-and-white: the colors of Alltel, his primary sponsor for all but six of this season's Sprint Cup races.
But, NASCAR lately is more about decals. This year's cars, by design, are all exactly the same shape and size. There's no difference, except where they place the decals that look like headlights, taillights, and grilles. That's the "car of tomorrow" philosophy. The only real difference is in the engine compartment.
So when someone in NASCAR Nation talks about a manufacturer's championship -- Chevy won it last year -- it won't mean a great deal. The cars are all the same. Rolling billboards that happen to have 800-horsepower V-8 engines.
Maybe this is why NASCAR's TV audience has declined a few percent each year since they inaugurated the "Chase for the Cup" format. Brand loyalty gets a little murky when your cars are all from the same cookie-cutter.
On the other hand, it could be the Chase format itself. If you know that there will be a 10-race "playoff" near the end of the season that determines the series champion, you pretty much know that the first 26 races of the season won't determine your champion. So you can afford to skip a few.
Memo to Ryan: run hard enough to make the Chase. Daytona's a great achievement. We'll all love to see you at the end of the season, too.
Hey, there are a bunch of new digital cameras being introduced at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week! Whoopee!
Here's a brand-new, 2008 model that looks very interesting. High-tech, big, sharp, 12X zoom lens, a minimum of
Yet, there's something oddly familiar about this brand-new camera. Photographic deja vu, if you will. Don't I already own this camera?
Why, yes I do. Sort of.
The model below is my Canon Sureshot AF35ML. Black, sharp lens, compact, few silvery frills. Even has the same basic butch hand grip on the right side of the camera.
Except this one uses film, has no zoom lens, and insists that you look through an optical viewfinder to compose your photos. Still, it's a pretty guy-looking camera design. From July, 1981.
In other words: 26 years later, I can have pretty much the same basic camera that's now locked away in my camera collection vault. Only in digital form, and with a zoom lens. Cool.
Maybe -- as Peter Allen used to say -- everything old is new again.
