Originally posted by Coeurdechene Not sure about that..they are already in life support and things don't look all that well... And wasn't kodak the one manufacturing Leica's sensors? Kodak situation is precarious, and even if the equity decides to develop the venture instead of sanitizing and selling for a profit i'm not sure if they will enter a risky enterprise.
Well this would put kodak in a good place to fill in, and start chipping away part of Sony's sensor market.
And what about Samsung, Dalsa...or other industrial sensor manufacturers would it be a wild idea them getting a hefty investment and moving in the photo sensor manufacturing business?
Kodak no longer has a sensor division. It was sold to Platinum Equity and it is CCD only with a bunch of negatives. Dalsa also makes CCD's.
Also, the Kodak fab could never ramp up the volumes affordably. They make chips starting at over $1,500 per unit. The 645D chip starts at $3,000 from one source I heard. Not sure how to verify, but it makes sense given the very low volume and the small size of the fab.
When sourcing a product like a sensor, this is not really about volume discounts. It's about paying up front for the production run or placing a surety on demand. The sensor is one thing, but each each buyer also has some control over the A/D backside of the chip. Nikon and Pentax appear to be superior to Sony at getting the best signals out of Sony chips!
Samsung, Panasonic and Fuji can all make sensors. The FF problem is volume vs. initial cost. These fabs require massive investments, especially as sensor size goes up. The whole floor has to be damped (as it does for making film emulsions in Kodak's Building 38) and quality control must be exact to be economical. Scaling up to FF production requires hundreds of millions of $$$'s. The cost to invest in FF for Pentax likely exceeds the entire net worth of Pentax, so there is no hope of Ricoh/Pentax funding this themselves.
Fuji may be a company to watch, but if they have an FF sunkworks for their X-Pro line, it is in the distant future. Panasonic has no incentive to eat into its m43 side biz. Samsung is a big question mark. Cameras in Asia are brand identified with Japanese companies and Samsung has had lots of trouble making progress despite some good designs. Their sensors lag. Any effort to get new supply in the channel will take years from now from any of these suppliers.
Sony is dominant. The even make the LCD's that go into the back of both Canon and Nikon cameras. The camera industry has often had limited suppliers for core components, like Seiko with shutter systems.