Kodak Theatre
I saw this in an e-mail blast and thought … wow… who’s going to pay $300 for an over designed media reader. Sure it will retrieve photos from a networked PC and play networked music… but so does AppleTV… for less!
Kodak didn’t think this thing through…. products that cost far less have failed. Even at a lower pricepoint, it really doesn’t provide any sort of additional value other than making a HD television an oversized digital photo frame.
Kodak has an incredible amount of value in its brand, but their products are simply sub-par when compared to companies like Sony, Canon and Nikon. They need to concentrate on making better cameras, not overpriced gadgets.
Kodak could provide more value by:
- It had a large harddrive, say 1 terabyte for transferring photos and video from your digital camera / media
- Cheaper
- Provide better value — tie to the Kodak Gallery service as a value add (and an upsell for that matter). I’m thinking a better implementation of .Mac… err…. sorry… MobileMe. Sychronized backups with an online service with an option to purchase prints through a single interface. With no storage limits for their premier service and their terms of service, talk about auto backup galore!
- Connect to other photo services, allowing file uploading to Flickr, Photbucket, etc….
- Provide a social networking option to Kodak Gallery to retrieve photos from friends and family (it’s kind of there now, but is nowhere near social)
Just some thoughts….
I was trying to give my photos that “Leica” look and was able to find a technique that allows me to do this. You can find this technique in a pretty old article on leica-users.org.
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