I worked on this camera in 1981-82. I built custom test equipment for the production lines in 81, and worked on circuit board manufacturing engineering in 82. Until early '82, even people like me who were working on The Project (as it was known) didn't know what the product was. It was top-secret.

The word around the office (once it was released) was that the Disc camera was an attempt at continuing the miniaturization of 126 and then 110, which were both slam-dunk successes. EK was also reacting to a recent beating they'd taken in the marketplace. Just before Christmas in 1977 (I think it was), Vivitar released a low-end consumer camera (126 or 110--not sure) with an electronic flash. The ad campaign featured a side-by-side comparison of photos of a little girl bouncing on a bid. The Vivitar electronic flash froze her in midair, while the Kodak electrochemical flashcube (remember how those smelled, oldtimers?) produced a blur. Vivitar really ate Kodak's lunch that holiday season in camera sales.

So Kodak wanted to hit a third home run creating a camera with a smaller form factor, adding electronic flash, and making it electrically self-winding. It really was an innovative product in the consumer market at that time. The higher-end model even had an integrated LCD clock with alarm (this was a *really* cool feature back then.) And the industrial design was good for that time, too: it looks quite a bit like one of today's digitals.

But it didn't pan out. The existing silver halide film grain size wasn't up to producing a reasonable image from a negative of that dimension. So Kodak developed a much finer-grained technology ("T-grain") that made disc pictures, well... almost as good as 110 if the lighting was right. T-grain greatly improved all of Kodak's other consumer film, which gave them an edge over Fuji (the scary Japanese competitor) but unfortunately, Disc image quality never rose much above "doesn't always suck". The damn negative was just too small. Plus, those discs were expensive and had fewer exposures than 126 or 110. It was really easy to burn a lot of film with them, something I'm sure Kodak initially thought was a good thing.

My guess, though, is that competitors provided more value for less money, and the product strategists at Kodak swinging for that third homer in the end just swatted it into the stands.

Kodak spent big, big money on Disc. I'm sure they lost millions. They lost more millions on other things: photocopiers (they initially had far and away the best image quality, and sold a lot of high-end business copiers, but eventually that ended), a huge microfilm storage and retrieval system, instant cameras, again the best film technology, but they had to get out of that business after Polaroid won a patent lawsuit against them. And endless cancelled R&D products that their engineers knew how to build but marketers couldn't figure out how to sell.

Despite the bungling management, the ill-advised attempts at diversification outside of their core competencies, and the long, slow, and then recently more precipitous slide they've gone through, Kodak is a great, great company to work for. It's a shame they have gone from world leader in photography to just an also-ran. Kodak was working on digital photography and imaging in the mid-1980's, but others got to market faster than they.

Kodak has been a great American success story, and deserves to be remembered for better than failed products like the Disc. Thanks for stimulating old memories.