I want it!!! More seriously tough, we live in the ear of crowd funding, someone needs to Kickstart this, I think it will meet the money in record time. It would breathe new life in all of the film cameras and make them new again. It might have been bad timing, but I think if this came out today it would be a hit, make sure it’s at least APSC, 12-16 megapixels, lots of storage space, and support most cameras. The product fell into oblivion afterwards and no one ever talked about a device that could fill the promises of the EFS-1. The last ditch effort from the company was the EFS10-SF, this time around it would have 10 megapixel images, it would support CF cards and would “Support most 35mm SLRs”. Everything was looking bad for the EFS-1.
#Digipod distribution plus#
Plus Silicon Film saw that they needed to create 6 different models to cover most of the cameras available. In a nutshell it was not going to work for the time. (6) SFI and ISC had scrapped the initial design of the EFS-1 and were scrambling to develop a new prototype (7) several key employees on the EFS-1 project left SFI further hampering the development process and (8) William Patton never accepted the position of Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of SFI. (5) EFS-1 technology presented potential patent conflicts with those already registered by Kodak The web-site sale commitments for domestic sales was for only a few dozen units However, the biggest contract SFI had was for 100 units to a European distributor who would not accept the units since they would not pass CE certification. The results of the internal design review were that SFI had a design and parts to produce about 200 units. (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. Specifically, it took hundreds of engineering hours to produce one unit with a success rate of about one unit in three working (3) the current design of the EFS-1 was extremely difficult to produce. (2) these design problems would prevent the unit from passing the required FCC and CE certifications necessary to publicly release the product (1) the EFS-1 suffered from serious and insurmountable technical design flaws From the class action suit you can read the issues facing the EFS-1: The enthusiasm was there, but Silicon film pulled the plug on the project months before coming to market. Jon Stern – Senior Engineer, Silicon Film Technologies It never made it to market When Silicon Film Technologies filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy in Sept of 2001 EFS-1 was probably 3 months (my estimate, our management was saying 2 months) from reaching the market place. The digital film was not fullframe, it was slightly smaller than APSC occupying 30% of the frame, and the crop factor was 2.58x. Not bad at all if you can forget the cheesy pose and lighting. The EFS-1 could create 1.3 Megapixel images, could only save 24 images (64mb memory) and was only compatible with a few cameras: Canon’s EOS 1N and EOS A2/5 and Nikon’s F5, F3, and N90/F90. But unfortunately the specs were really low in modern terms. Everything could be neatly stacked like so: You could slide the eFilm into the ePort to plug into your computer or you could slide them into the eBox to offload the images to a CF card. The system had 3 parts: The eFilm, the ebox and the eport. It would require no modification to the original camera and you could use either film or digital as you please. It was not a digital back like the Kodak’s or Mamiya’s but a film replacement. In 2001 when Silicon Film introduced the EFS-1 the technology was amazing: A digital film that can go inside a film camera. Quite the bulk, no? Medium Format users knows what digital backs are, as the back of many medium format cameras like Mamiya can be removed to put in something else. In the early days of Digital, companies like Kodak made Digital backs to popular cameras like the Nikon N90s: Click for Image Source One is a photosensitive film, the other a photosensitive sensor. Thinking about it, the biggest difference between a Digital Camera and a Film camera is simply the capturing method. Little did I know that a company called “Silcon Film” worked on exactly that technology. Hen I bought my Nikon SLR a while ago (in the ear of Dinosaurs), I always thought it would be cool if you could put in a digital sensor in as a film.