>>4144077This is basically what happened. They bet against digital and lost. While LF was just recently surpassed by single shot digital with the IQ4 150, most consumers(and pros) would rather have the convenience and cost savings of digital, even when digital was worse IQ(which was the case for MF until 2010s ish and LF a few years ago).
Based on a couple of textbooks I have written by Kodak color scientists, think there was a lot yes sir-ism when it obvious digital was the future that hindered a successful transition away from film into digital.
Its quite sad considering Kodak invented and patented most of the digital stuff, including but not limited to: CCD sensor tech, early CFA design, digital color encoding schemes(not a trivial problem to solve) and color spaces(ProphotoRGB). Hell, they were even making a large chunk of the early CCD sensors and inline scanning arrays, the P25, 30, 65, etc series digital back all used Kodak CCD tech.
I have this book called "Digital Color Management" written by 2 kodak color scientists. Despite the title, the whole book assumes you're shooting film and want to digitize it. The whole book is kinda worthless except for display profiling chapter. Its been known for years, even before digital, that film had fundamental limitations. Kodak overlooked all this and stuck with film, and went bankrupt.
