Kodak calls for connected cameras

Proprietary technologies only confuse consumers, says Kodak chief

Kodak chief executive Antonio Perez called on his peers in the industry to break with the tradition of designing standalone devices that lock in content.

Such proprietary technologies only confuse consumers, he asserted during a speech at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

"Digital products and services should not require our customers to be engineers or professional photographers, but should inspire them to be artists and publishers as they capture the moments of their lives, as they see them, with intuitive ease," he said.

Most digital cameras are "dinosaurs", according to Perez, because they merely copy the 125 year-old features of traditional cameras. "All the imaging industry has done is to replace silver with silicon," he maintained.

Digital cameras instead should be designed from the ground up to enable users to easily share, backup and present their pictures.

Perez highlighted Kodak technologies that time-stamp a digital image with a GPS location, allowing users to find their images based on the location where they were taken.

Another technology organises pictures based on their content, allowing for the grouping of all pictures of one person or all pictures taken at Christmas, for example.
Kodak also disclosed a new partnership with mobile phone maker Motorola which will bring Kodak's imaging technology to Motorola phones.

It will also ensure seamless collaboration between devices from the two companies enabling a printer to easily print a picture taken by a mobile phone camera.