Digital Camera News, Reviews and Tips
Kodak SMILE Instant Printer
Instant cameras and printers using Zink (zero ink) technology have continued to grow in popularity over the past few years. Zink printers from numerous manufactures were a leading photography tech trend at CES 2019 and included printers from HP, Canon, Polaroid and, of course, Kodak. [Read more…]
Kodak Booth at CES 2019
As digital imaging continues to mature as a market, we’re still sorting out the back and forth of analog media. Portable printing is becoming a big deal and several companies, including Kodak, are offering some impressive ZINK printers, which I’ll touch on in a different post.
Kodak also has a few solutions for scanning your images to digital files, some of which have been on the market for longer than others. [Read more…]
Remember that bizarre turn of events at CES this year when a bitcoin mining machine, called the KashMiner, showed up at Kodak’s booth? It appears to now be officially dead.
According to a report from BBC, the Kodak-brand licensee behind the KashMiner has halted its plans for the bitcoin miner rental scheme. [Read more…]
It was a dark day for film when Kodak killed Kodachrome back in 2009. After Kodachrome stock ran out, there was one final photo lab in the country that could process Kodachrome – Dwayne’s Photo in Kansas. Dwayne’s Photo ran out of the chemicals to process Kodachrome in December 2010, which was the final nail in the coffin for Kodachrome film. [Read more…]
? Ohh, I'm gonna getcha with the Kodak KashMiner ? pic.twitter.com/IX5zy5vtCf
— Jeremi M Gosney (@jmgosney) January 10, 2018
Remember a couple years ago when Kodak announced a cool new Super 8 camera and everyone thought it was great?
Today’s story is nothing like that.
Yesterday, Kodak announced a new cryptocurrency called KODAKCoin and a blockchain technology for licensing images called KODAKOne. Today, on the CES 2018 show floor, Kodak showed off its new Kodak KashMiner, which mines bitcoin.
Essentially, you pay $3400 to rent the Kodak KashMiner for two years. During that time, Kodak keeps 50% of the bitcoin revenue and Kodak estimates that you’ll receive $375 per month for a total USD equivalent payout of $9,000.
There are a number of problems with this scenario.
First, the Kodak KashMiner miner appears to be rebranded Bitmain Antminer S9, which retails for around $2400. So, Kodak is renting its KashMiner to you for $1000 more than you could buy it outright and have forever. This will likely put even more pressure on the supply and demand bottleneck right now since Antminer S9s are going for around $6,000 on the secondary market. Way to go Kodak.
For those ppl asking about the actual #KodakMiner for @Kodak at #CES they had it out day 1. It appears to be a 1gen Bitmain S9. Does 11/th pic.twitter.com/76vIx5yO4Z
— Angry Albert (@Angry_Albert) January 10, 2018
Second, Kodak’s calculations assume that the difficulty level of mining bitcoin stays the same, when the difficulty level has been increasing by about 15% per month. Accordingly, the anticipated mining revenue is way off over the course of those two years. And if the value of bitcoin drops from current, it’s an even worse deal.
There is no way your magical Kodak miner will make the same $375 every month, unless Bitcoin mining difficulty stays the same. It is currently increasing at around 15% a month, so mining output should drop around 15% a month, too. Good luck to everyone who bought this deal! pic.twitter.com/0xA2HNtHFc
— Saifedean Ammous (@saifedean) January 10, 2018
I find the label at the top of the page “In Math We Trust” to be more than a little ironic. There are apparently already 80 contracts for Kodak KashMiner and another 300 units are on the way.
Kodak appears to have simply slapped a sticker on the side of the industry standard bitcoin miner and charged you $1000 more for a 2-year rental fee than you can buy one outright. For every eyebrow that may have been raised with interest in the earlier announcement of KODAKOne and KODAKCoin, this move undermines the legitimacy that Kodak could have for its blockchain technology.
If Kodak wanted to become a real player in the cryptocurrency and blockchain market, it could have blown the doors off CES by bringing in actual hardware to the US and helped the bottleneck in supply chain. Instead, Kodak looks like a total shill after a quick stock pump.
Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have been exploding in recent months. Bitcoin’s price soared to over $20,000 in December, while other alt-coins rose in price and pushed the global cryptocurrency market cap over $750 billion.
I had a draft post in the hopper for Photography Bay a week and a half ago titled “How Blockchain Technology Could Affect Photography.” I have been digging into cryptocurrency and blockchain for a while now and was thinking forward about a licensing and ownership tracking method for photographs, along with a payment method for photographers. (There are over 1,000 crytpocurrencies in existence today across a wide range of industries and use cases.) Here sits the post in my trash file from when I put it there 9 days ago:
I kept hacking at the posted and ended up trashing it because I thought I was reaching too far and maybe it wasn’t all that relevant as a concept. As it turns out, Kodak was way ahead of me and I would’ve looked like a Nostradamus had I published that post a few days ago.
Kodak is officially moving into the crypto market with today’s announcement of the KODAKCoin, which is “a photo-centric cryptocurrency to empower photographers and agencies to take greater control in image rights management.” [Read more…]
Kodak is betting on the rise on an analog renaissance with its new Super 8 film camera for making motion pictures that it announced at CES 2016. [Read more…]
Kodak has unveiled a new version of its SP360 action camera. The Kodak PIXPRO SP360-4K camera features a 12MP sensor and a 360° lens for panoramic photo and video imagery. [Read more…]
The Kodak Instamatic is coming back in the form of an Android smartphone that will launch at CES 2015 in a couple weeks. [Read more…]
This one is hard for me to believe, but Kodak has officially discontinued its BW400CN film. The great thing about Kodak BW400CN film was that it was readily available everywhere and could be developed anywhere you could develop color prints because it was C-41 process compatible. [Read more…]