Live from Austin!

How did Polaroid end up bankrupt? They’re looking at either selling the company, or filing Chapter 11. They expect to default on over $30m of loan payments in the next few months.

It’s easy to say that they were caught out by digital cameras, but it’s not that simple. I remember the early days of digital photography, around 1996-97. For a while, Polaroid were leaders in the field—the PDC-2000 was well-reviewed, and praised for its outstanding image quality. Later on, Polaroid launched digital cameras at consumer prices that were competitive with those from Nikon, Canon, Kodak, and so on.

They also knew their patents on instant photography were going to expire. So what happened? Why did they throw all their energies at cheap plastic instant cameras with pictures of The Spice Girls and Hello Kitty on them, and ignore digital? Maybe someone will write a book about it, like the various books about how Apple and Xerox made incredibly boneheaded decisions. For now, my guess is that someone high up wasn’t able to demonstrate flexibility.

I miss the Polaroid head office that used to be in Tech Square. And I was sorry when the other Polaroid building on the riverfront had its classic 30s design ruined.

It seems Kodak is the latest company to find out what happens when you get into bed with Microsoft. They worked with Redmond to improve Windows support for digital cameras—but they discovered that when you plugged a Kodak digital camera into Windows XP, it ignored the Kodak software and launched Microsoft’s software instead. Getting it to launch the Kodak software for your Kodak camera required a complicated nine-click crawl through system dialog boxes. That’s even if you’d explicitly installed the Kodak software.

Windows XP also tries to push users into using digital printing services which have signed licensing deals with Microsoft, by making sure Windows XP only offers those companies in the appropriate selection box. In other words, Microsoft wants to get a cut of whatever you pay for your photographic prints. If the processing company won’t pay a per-print fee to Redmond, the Windows digital photo software won’t upload your files there.

My photography is completely digital—except for the initial exposures, which I still do on film. This isn’t because I like film; it’s because I don’t have the cash for a digital camera with comparable resolution, and because color negative film has far better exposure latitude.

Exposure latitude is very important to me, because everything I do is natural light. I just don’t like fill-flash, even when it’s exposed perfectly. It makes the photograph look artificial and flat. Sure, it gets rid of shadows on people’s faces, but in real life we see shadows all the time.

So I expose film—usually Kodak Royal Gold—and then get Kodak to develop it into a negative strip. I chop the strip and run it through the film scanner, hand-optimizing the scanner response curves for each frame. A 35mm negative has a lot more information than can be shown on the screen, and by tweaking the curves I can bring out shadow detail, prevent loss of contrast in highlights, and use more of the available contrast for the bits of the image I want.

With a digital camera, you’re stuck with the information captured by what is effectively a scanner, and you don’t get to adjust response curves. In fact, it’s worse than that: my film scanner measures 10 bits of red, green and blue in every pixel. By comparison, a digital camera has only 8 bits of resolution per color channel, and each pixel is actually only measured in one of the three primary colors—the missing information is interpolated in software.

Anyway, the reason I’m pissed off is that the trained chimps at Kodak just stuck the roll of developed negative unprotected in a dusty piece of carboard tube, then put that in an envelope. So my negatives are covered in dust, and probably scratched to hell as well. What they should have done is put the negatives in a strip of protective paper before rolling them up.

Of course, the only reason I bought my own scanner was that Kodak screwed up producing Photo CDs for me, and managed to badly scratch one of the discs. They can’t be trusted to expose prints properly either, as you probably know if you have a camera. But there’s really not much you can fuck up when simply processing a strip of 35mm negatives—these days it’s pretty much a matter of sticking the film in one end of the machine and taking it out at the other end. I didn’t even ask them to cut the film into pieces.

Trivia: My grandfather invented the machinery used to automatically clean and dry 35mm film after processing. I spent a week working at Rank Film Labs as part of a work experience scheme, and got to repair several of those machines.

I think I’m going to see if I can find some place locally that actually does the film processing themselves. Since I’m only getting the negatives processed, I can probably afford to pay pro prices.

I missed out the final step, of course. Although I have a color printer which can produce output comparable to one-hour photo labs, I find it far more easy and convenient to order prints from Ofoto. I quarter the resolution of the negative scans, then compress to JPEGs of around 100-150K each. The end result is true photographic prints that look better than 3-day optical prints from the local photo stores.

Some people may wonder why my web site was left unchanged for over a year. Well, I’m engaged in a lengthy project to digitize my entire photo collection, using a Nikon film scanner to produce 3000×2000 scans direct from the negatives.

Some of the images are decades old, and often the film has deteriorated and needs careful restoration. Color film in the 70s really wasn’t very stable, and these negatives haven’t been particularly well cared for either. My plan is to scan them, fix them, and archive them onto digital media.

Of course, this requires some care—five years ago, it might have seemed like a sensible idea to archive onto Syquest cartridges, after all. Who’s to say what will be around in another decade? Will we even be able to read most of today’s file formats? (How many art programs read NeoPaint files?)

A lot of people use TIFF. Few of them realize it, but TIFF is a really ugly file format originated by Microsoft. I say it’s ugly because I’ve read the specification. It has a zillion variations, including different byte ordering on different platforms. I’ve seen graphics packages which both claim to read and write TIFF, but won’t read each other’s files. So for archiving, TIFF is a definite no-no.

PNG is an open standard, it’s lossless, and it gets better compression than practically every comparable format, including TIFF. Because it uses no patented algorithms, it’s likely that every graphics program will at least have code to read it. Because Open Source implementations of the algorithm are available, I know that if the worst comes to the worst I can always write my own program to read PNG and write it into whatever’s the appropriate format in ten years’ time. So it’s PNG for me.

Anyway, after months of work my hard drive was getting dangerously full, so this weekend I bought a CD burner. Of all the data storage media out there, I think CD is the one most likely to still be readable in a couple of decades. I’m planning on using the Kodak pro-grade gold CD-Rs, which have a rated life of 100 years.

CD is a bit of a bitch to use, however. You have to burn the discs, verify them afterwards, and so on. On PCs, this generally involves a lot of dicking around with flaky driver software; the ThinkPad at work refuses to boot if the CD burner is plugged in, so you have to boot first, then plug and pray, and about half the time it’ll then recognize the drive. Assuming that worked, you can then try and burn a disc, which works about 80% of the time. The rest of the time the CD burning software hangs while updating the catalog at the end of the burn, and you have another coaster.

I was determined not to have similar experiences at home. Of course, I have a Mac at home, so that was a good start. Then I picked out a CD burner which was Firewire, so (a) I wouldn’t have any buffer underrun problems, and (b) I wouldn’t have to dick around with SCSI or USB drivers and termination problems.

Next, I narrowed my selection down to CD burners which were approved by Adaptec (who now want to be called Roxio), who make the Toast software used by practically everyone who burns CDs for a living.

Finally, I picked a drive which had the latest BurnProof technology. This is a hardware feature where if the drive stops receiving data fast enough—say, because Internet Explorer chokes while you’re browsing the web—the laser stops in a controlled fashion, marking how far it had got so it can continue when the data flow resumes. Which means fewer coasters, and the option of burning CDs while doing something else.

That’s the theory. Of course, no matter how careful and prepared you are, the universe has a way of screwing you over. In this case, I managed to get a faulty CD burner, and wasted most of yesterday trying to coax it into working properly. It would act just like it was working, but the CD would never verify and would be full of random (but sonically interesting) flipped bits.

Fortunately, I foresaw even this eventuality. Rather than trying to save $50 by buying online, I had decided to slum it and buy from CompUSA. So instead of paying two sets of shipping charges and waiting several days for a replacement, I picked up another burner this morning. The new one works fine. Rips at 40x, burns at 14x. Sweet!

I’ll carry on using DVD-RAM for day-to-day stuff, as it’s just vastly more convenient than CD. But now when everything’s finalized and annotated and cataloged, I can burn it on gold for keeps.

The CDRW drive I picked was a QPS Que! and in spite of the initial problems, I’m happy with it on balance.