I was talking about compact cameras there, because realistically that is all almost anyone was buying, even in corporate environments.
I think they sold in the low thousands of that DSLR (since it was a $15K camera). And the state of these partnership cameras was such that it was obvious they were something of a bridge to nowhere. Anyone could see that once Canon and Nikon began making their own things, Kodak would have trouble carrying on with their remodelled cameras.
Nikon had already shipped their first "conventional" in-house DSLR by then, and it was blowing people away.
Kodak should arguably have bought Sigma around then, but they didn't. They continued making these reworked/hybrid Canon/Nikon things until 2004 but when they quit making DSLRs they said the sector had "poor profitability". In 2005! Even Nikon was making a profit in 2005.
Back to the compact cameras:
This is the higher-end compact camera Canon shipped in 2000 (that all the real estate photographers were using):
This is its Nikon competition, which was an incredible camera widely used in professional settings; they turned up in labs attached to microscopes, in rapid newspaper repro, in museums, web development agencies, all over the place:
Sony, Fuji and Olympus had great kit in this segment already. Kodak really just had nothing even close as far as enthusiasts and early adopters were concerned.
I guess the Sigma film SLRs and DSLRs were in some ways functionally behind (in terms of stuff like handling and autofocus), and it wouldn't necessarily be cheap to catch up. Also early-2000s era Sigma didn't actually own all of Foveon yet, I suppose.
There has always been some suggestion that Sigma didn't entertain offers to become a big camera brand because it would lose the quiet tolerance it had earned from Japanese camera brands that allowed it to make most of its money from third-party lenses without squabbles over proprietary information.
I think they sold in the low thousands of that DSLR (since it was a $15K camera). And the state of these partnership cameras was such that it was obvious they were something of a bridge to nowhere. Anyone could see that once Canon and Nikon began making their own things, Kodak would have trouble carrying on with their remodelled cameras.
Nikon had already shipped their first "conventional" in-house DSLR by then, and it was blowing people away.
Kodak should arguably have bought Sigma around then, but they didn't. They continued making these reworked/hybrid Canon/Nikon things until 2004 but when they quit making DSLRs they said the sector had "poor profitability". In 2005! Even Nikon was making a profit in 2005.
Back to the compact cameras:
This is the higher-end compact camera Canon shipped in 2000 (that all the real estate photographers were using):
https://www.dpreview.com/reviews/canong1
This is its Nikon competition, which was an incredible camera widely used in professional settings; they turned up in labs attached to microscopes, in rapid newspaper repro, in museums, web development agencies, all over the place:
https://www.dpreview.com/reviews/nikoncp990
Sony, Fuji and Olympus had great kit in this segment already. Kodak really just had nothing even close as far as enthusiasts and early adopters were concerned.