Faded dream: blogger looks back at the failure of the Silicon Film project

It's my dream. I would buy one. Honorio, Brazil.

Canon's affordable full frame cameras have made the whole project redundant. Since the original EOS 5D was launched, it has opened the door for all kinds of adapted lenses running on their original format, a bonus is that Canon's EF system allows for metering and function without a detected lens. Most of the major systems can mount to Canon EF with no optical modification, including Nikon F, Olympus OM, Pentax K, Leica R, M42, Contax/Yashica, and Rollei mounts. So you can faithfully reproduce the optical quirks that these various vintage lenses posess, without having to use the lens on it's native system.

Digipod: according to himself he need 1000 backers for a crop 4 sensor, 2000 backers for a crop 3 sensor and 5000 backers for a crop 2 sensor. He currently have 35 backers and a third of time has passed. It does not look good.

You can just shoot film and get the negs digitalized when you bring them to the lab to be processed. I get very good scans on dvd from my lab at fair price. The best of both worlds... I have the pleasure to shoot portra on leica m6, nikon F3 or hasselblad and get good scans in a few hours, less time that i usually spend on editing and processing raw files in LR. When i want or need digital, i use a digital camera.
The digital cartridge seems nice at first, but at the end wont be as good as an integrated digital slr. And a lot of the pleasure with film cameras is the delay between shooting and viewing the images.

I would buy one or more in a flash! I've still got my Nikomat, F, F2, FM2, FE2, FA, F3, F4 & F5 and 18 manual AIs lenses. I just need a digital or insert to go with them.

I'd pay $500 for it if it was full frame!

Back in the day when we could get date back replacement upgrade for our camera; I suppose it'd still be possible with such data backs, thus having enough room for electronics (with some problem for nose area, photog needs to breath as well)
About electromechanical control/sensor, now that's another engineering problem.

Today?
2nd hand 6MP APS-C sized sensor DSLR can be bought for about 150 bucks, coupled with some basic lens.
If this device wish to compete with that, it should cost less than 100 bucks and still no more easier than that relic DSLR (and worse IQ).

Inconvenient, who cares. That's the point really. Film was, but now we can develop ourselves. Raw files (dng format especially) would be best then you don't have to worry about white balance. No preview of your images, just reliance on good photography fundamentals without the hassle of film after.

I think if someone makes a full frame one that shoots up to 200 images or more on one charge, it's an instant success. Period.

I'd go get one then go buy some more film cameras tomorrow. It's a great idea, soon as someone does one successfully its going to sell in boat loads and you'll probably see film camera prices go up too. Imagine using a Contax G2 with this. Oooooops!

First cam I'd get is a Contax N or Maxxum 9 Ti, then go have a fricken blast.

C

I remember the news, the sceptism, vapour ware labelling and clear signals it was a no-go project...BUT, deep down, in the soul of thought I really wanted them to succeed. With 5 or 6 film bodies unused in years and just as many digital bodies bought and sold, I'd still love to have something to bring life back to life so many marvelous camera designs....that were built to last more than a couple of years!

The main two problems with Silicon Film was that there would be a race between it and digital cameras and that there was rather profound technical challenges.

The main advantage for the efilm team was that they did not have to make a camera.

The disadvantages made it doomed from the start IMHO. While the efilm team tried to solve the problems, large camera makers, like Nikon made cameras. Not so good and rather expensive cameras to begin with. But, the efilm team had the same problems and much more and not the same kind of muscles.

The only hope for the efilm team would be if the camera makers decided to go on concentrating on film cameras, and postpone their interest in digital cameras. But ... this would also mean a lack of suitable sensors.

For Jon Stern.

You have a long list of misunderstandings you want to put right in the posts below. Interesting to read maybe.

But, was not the biggest misunderstanding that this idea had any bearing at all? How come that you even tried it?

To me it was obvious the first time I heard about it that it was not a brilliant idea. Making a camera is much easier than making the digital film insert.

Most of the popular SLRs had removable doors on the back. Why not make camera specific removable "film backs?" OM and FM for starters. It seems like it would overcome most challenges except viewfinder crop. (This could be helped by custom focus screens that were also removable).

They just need to make a nice DSLR with real ergonomics.

Fuji's X-series is nice, but I really crave the look of a big, bright, MF SLR viewfinder (fully silvered mirror) with a true matte, along with the refined ergonomics, build quality, and compact size of something like the Contax 139.

It's great seeing Joanna again. I think Phil and Joanna did an excellent job getting this site off the ground as it quickly became the cream of the crop during the early days of digital photography.

It was the dream of every film SLR owner for this to take off. They wanted to hold on to their SLR and mix it with digital.

It was a noble goal, but technology just zoomed past and never looked back.

Consumers today are so spoiled with AF Micro Adjustment and Live View.

The tolerances of even the most basic of DSLRs coupled with modern cheap high IQ lenses just raised the stakes beyond reach of this project.

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Do not bother your head with useless technologies. Just use film cameras as intended (if you know how) and get pleasure from the process until it is available.

The "6 models" were all the same until the very final step of the assembly process, when the distance between the "film can" and the sensor was locked down. It was all achieved by simply cutting the sensor flex cable to the length required for a particular model, sticking it down and applying the top metal "flag" cover. Oh, we also had a different-colored vinyl label that was applied to the "film can" for each of the six variants. Interestingly, most of the major SLRs were covered by just three of these configurations.

This approach allowed close to complete production and inventorying of the EFS-1. When orders for different models came in we would have been quickly able to configure them (in a few minutes); perform final test; package; and then ship.

I won't say much about "Silicon Film EFS10-SF", as I had little involvement after the closure on 9/14/2001. I don't really consider that to be part of the real Silicon Film history.

Re: 8) William Patton never accepted the position of Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of SFI. In a nutshell it was not going to work for the time. Plus Silicon Film saw that they needed to create 6 different models to cover most of the cameras available. Everything was looking bad for the EFS-1.

The William Patton ("General" Patton, as we called him) incident was a funny one. The staff was introduced to him and never saw him again. This was not long before we finally ran out of cash and closed our doors (the week of the 9/11 attacks). I don't think this affected the outcome, it's just a strange footnote in the history.

Re: 7) several key employees on the EFS-1 project left SFI further hampering the development process

We were struggling towards the end. As mentioned above, the dot com bubble bursting had it close to impossible to get VC funding for tech companies (how ironic given that just a few years earlier we were being asked if we could see a way of putting a dot com angle on the business by some investors who would then have been interested). We had to downsize to preserve cash in Sping of 2001 (or thereabout). None of the people let go were deemed essential for the development process.

Re: 6) SFI and ISC had scrapped the initial design of the EFS-1 and were scrambling to develop a new prototype

False. The orignal ~3x factor in EFS-1 was known to have limited market appeal. I was already leading the development of the next version to address this and enable a larger market acceptance. We already had functional sensors of a 4MP, ~29mm x 19mm sensor for the next product running in the lab.

I'm laughing at this one because somehow a positive (that we were working on a better gen. 2 product) has been perverted in to us scrapping EFS-1.

Re: 5) EFS-1 technology presented potential patent conflicts with those already registered by Kodak

False. Kodak's patent had a later filing date than ours, and while it included some claims we didn't have, they were not useful (we didn't need to infringe on them).

Incidentally, we had an extremely good relationship with Kodak. In large part thanks to one of our board members, Tom Kelly, having formerly been a senior manager at Kodak (he led the team that developed what was marketed as the "Apple Quicktake"), and our CEO Ken Fey having been responsible for setting up Kodak's point-and-shoot production in China.

Re: 4) an internal design review was conducted in May, 2001 with all the top officers of SFI, ISC and all of the suppliers for the EFS-1 that were owed millions of dollars. [Snip due to DPReview character limits]

There's some fairness in this. We were short of ceramics for the sensor package, but already had prototypes for a lower-cost, more easily sourced design. Supply would have been limited until we could ramp that up fully.

We were not taking orders because we were not ready to ship. Our approach was to slowly ramp, in large part because money was tight in 2001 after the dot com crash. We were running on our cash reserves and pre-MP funding was almost impossible to find in a technology-hostile investment climate. The strategy set out by the executive team was to get to limited, volume mass production and product launch, knowing that raising funding for MP ramp would them be much easier.

Re: 3) the current design of the EFS-1 was extremely difficult to produce. Specifically, it took hundreds of engineering hours to produce one unit with a success rate of about one unit in three working;

We were hand-building the prototypes without the final mass production tooling and it was slow (I don't know where hundred of engineering hours comes from!) and we had a low yield. This was of concern to me, but mostly from the perspective of MP schedule and ramp.

Anyone who has been involved in real mass production knows that assembly cycle time and yield go through a steep, early learning curve. There were no fundamental issues with our assembly process, which was a lot simpler than DSLRs of the time.

Re: 2) these design problems would prevent the unit from passing the required FCC and CE certifications necessary to publicly release the product

I love how that rumor with a grain of truth became an internet fact.

We did have some issue with some of our FCC pre-screens at one point (anyone who has ever done this kind of work knows how frustrating that process can be). This was when downloading from the (e)port to a PC over USB. We modified some of the filters on the board, but still we were having intermittent fails. Eventually we found that we only failed when using a USB cable without a ferrite chock. Switching over to that type of cable resolved this issue.

As for CE, the first version of our firmware would have failed CE testing because it didn't have a safe recovery from a crash (that required removal of the batteries). This was not a fundamental issue though. It just needed some new code that the executive management decided to de-prioritize until after the US launch.

It's always interesting to read outsider's views on Silicon Film (especially those that quote me). Typically there are a number of errors.

Re: 1) the EFS-1 suffered from serious and insurmountable technical design flaws

Not true. There were many challenges that others could not forsee ways of over-coming (that included Canon's engineers when they reviewed the idea back in ~99). However, we had a really talented group of engineers and by a mixture of creative thinking and clever engineering, we managed to over-come all of these "insurmountable" flaws.

If Oliver Duong cares to list all of these flaws, I'd be happy to address them line by line.

I'd love it, in full format. No need for an LCD. It doesn't even need any JPEG processing. Just capture the light information on the sensor, and store it. Later, all the processing could be done on the computer.

Back in the day, nice idea... but today?
Well I simply don't see any potential advantage in this... We have an abundance of great digital bodies - for almost any taste.
The only thing this would bring is an awkward way to control it, even less practical for quick reviewing and I can't see any advantages over even the most basic DSLR with this.

A good friend of mine spoke with the developper of this idea on the Photokina long long ago. When he returned he was flabbergasted about the idea and over the problems that had to be solved.
The biggest problem that had to be tackled was money. May be Lomography could pick this up with a fund raisong project?

It was doomed from the start. Extremely impractical, compared to a digital camera. There are so many problems to solve and so little functionality to get. And it assumed an already existing camera. It would be like selling electrical motors to petrol cars, or LCD screens to old TV sets. Its much better to make electrical cars and LCD TVs. The same goes for digital cameras.