Amusingly, it's also a video camera, since the viewfinder is an LCD display. Not clear if the manual aperture and shutter time settings affect the viewfinder. You can feed video into the display (why?) but it's not clear if you can get video out of the camera. The film costs $50 to $75 per cartridge, for a running time of 3.5 minutes. Market: wannabe hipsters and old guys in the movie industry.
Kodak makes movie film only because the major studios, at the urging of some older directors, pay them to do so.[1] (Pro movie film sales were down 96%) The studios have to pay for a certain amount of film whether they take it or not. This leaves Kodak with a paid-for, underutilized film production plant and film development facilities. That's probably why Kodak is doing this.
This is probably what's called a 'video assist' in the film industry: when the film is being pulled through the gate, it's shielded from the light by a spinning mirror. In a fully-analog camera, that mirror reflects the light up to a ground glass target in the eyepiece, so the cinematographer sees the light that isn't recorded onto the film.
With a video assist, that light is simply captured by a sensor (yes, exactly like in a video camera) and presented to the user on a video display. Some use a beam-splitter to deliver the analog view to the cameraperson while still sending some photons to the video tap.
Note, in both cases, the light that hits the film itself is never visible to anyone until after development -- the camera crew gets to see the photons that are rejected, which can do weird things when you go to unusual shutter speeds (the image gets darker in the viewfinder as you increase the exposure)... though I believe there were some 16mm Bolexes that simply used a beamsplitter, so the viewer saw the same scene as the film stock -- but don't quote me on that.
Amusing idea: conceal a flash chip in the film cartridge and record video to it from the camera used for the viewfinder. Put in a sound generator to make clicky film advance mechanism noises when taking pictures. The film in the cartridge is just a dummy and is not exposed. When the film cartridge is mailed in for processing, download the video, run it through Filmlook to give it grain and jitter, then upload to the cloud server. If the user orders the "return processed film" option, print the video to film stock at the processing plant.
I'd guess it's cheaper/easier than using glass especially to support swivel. Unclear if there's a prism in the light path though or if they're getting the image to the sensor in some other way. It would seem to take away from the whole retro vibe though.
Also, the "viewfinder" is one of those (relatively speaking) huge panels that fold out from the side. Try doing that with a 100% analogue camera! I reckon it's a clever hybrid.
(Plus it has SD, USB, etc... but there's no documentation as to what they do. Maybe you can store lo-fi digital versions for rushes and offline pre-editing.)
2. The whole point of this exercise is to make a product for people who want a retro (and largely impractical) film movie camera. What people are used to is [EDIT: 100% digital cameras].
Kodak makes movie film only because the major studios, at the urging of some older directors, pay them to do so.[1] (Pro movie film sales were down 96%) The studios have to pay for a certain amount of film whether they take it or not. This leaves Kodak with a paid-for, underutilized film production plant and film development facilities. That's probably why Kodak is doing this.
[1] http://www.wsj.com/articles/kodak-to-continue-making-movie-f...