“Eastman Kodak Co, the bankrupt inventor of the hand-held camera, plans to stop making digital cameras, pocket video cameras and digital picture frames in the first half of 2012 in a bid to cut costs,” Reuters reports. “The move marks the end of an era for Kodak, which is seen as one of the biggest corporate casualties of the digital age, after it failed to quickly embrace modern technologies such as digital photography, a product that it also invented.”
“The company, which filed for bankruptcy protection last month, said on Thursday that the move would result in ‘significant’ job losses at the business, which employs 400 people most of whom are based in Rochester, New York,” Reuters reports. “Kodak will take a charge of about $30 million to leave the business. It expects the exit to generate more than $100 million in annual operating savings. Kodak has not disclosed its employee numbers since the end of 2010 when it announced that it had a work force of 18,800 employees.”
Reuters reports, “The company, which generates three-quarters of its revenue from digital, plans to instead focus on seeking licensees to expand its brand licensing program. It plans to continue to offer online and retail photo printing, and desktop printers.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: We knew it was coming, but still… wow.
Related articles:
Apple claims ownership of digital photography patents asserted by Kodak – January 20, 2012
Kodak files for bankruptcy, secures $950 million lifeline – January 19, 2012
Kodak, the new Polaroid.
It’s sad that the technology it invented is the cause of its demise.
I’m very surprised that no one has put in a bid to buy the company, given the value of the patents held.
My company owned the first Kodak digital camera and although the resolution was extremely low and there was a lot of artefacts due to the high compression used (memory was very expensive), it did show the potential of the technology.
Very sad day indeed!
I believe their debts are a significant impediment.
Kodak also holds a lot of property containing significant amounts of pollution as well as vast amounts of now redundant film, paper and chemistry manufacturing equipment. IOW: Kodak holds a lot of bad ‘assets’ that no one wants.
Selling their patents has far better prospects than selling the company.
Oh well, they make more suing others than on their cheaply made products anyway. So Kodak is now more synonymous with a “Sue-wage Plant” than photography! ;-P
One distant day such news will come from Apple Inc. (with no less shock).
you’re right Sleii.
Absolutely. One day we will hear the shocking news that Apple has decided to stop making cameras.
Wait, what?
——RM
Cameras are not what Apple makes, Milord.
I think the taxpayers should bail them out like GM.
GM has turned around. Kodak will never be able to turn around and be profitable as is. Apple should buy Kodak so if could own all of their patents.
Uh, no. GM hasn’t turned around. They still owe us about $60 billion from the bailout.
Phucking doosh. UR wrong.
I think the taxpayers should bail them out like GM.
Joke. Right? Much as I appreciate GM finally getting their act together after all these DECADES of neglecting their business, GM should NEVER have been bailed out. They should have gone bankrupt, as Kodak has done, and dealt with their problems from there. It’s called “Capitalism“. Remember that?
I remember when Kodak was running their ads touting the superiority of film to digital capture, and I thought,
“Kodak sees the future, and instead of embracing and innovating to profit along with it, Kodak is trying to convince people not to look behind the curtain. This does not bode well for Kodak.”
And when I saw Kodak’s half-hearted, back-ass attempt to market digital still cameras, with their ridiculous docking stations, I thought,
“Kodak is dead.”
Kodak was at least in decay mode. Imagine what those of us with half-a-brain working at Kodak were thinking. I got to work directly with the Digital Imagining division. OMFG what a catastrophic mess of half-hearted, half-assed products thanks to dimwit Marketing-As-Management in charge. R&D is doomed when marketing minds are in charge. I left and felt sorry for those who stayed behind.
No big loss in Kodak not manufacturing digital camera. The fact is that they suck at it. Kodak was never in the business of manufacturing cameras. They made devices which consumed film. The Instamatic was a lousy camera but boy, could it burn through film! Cameras made by Kodak today are no better than the Instamatic, only, the new cameras don’t burn any film.
I got my first camera when I was a kid, back in the the late 60’s. I believe it was a Kodak Brownie Fiesta R4. I just found it probably sold for only $9.00!
A lens I bought last year was about $2,400.00, which could have bought a car at that time. Of course the quality of the images I get today would have been science fiction back then.
I wouldn’t want to go back to the old Brownie, but I wish I still had it.
I feel sorry for Rochester. This is just another hammering that town doesn’t need.
——RM
I live in the Rochester, NY area. Thank you for your concern. Actually, the demise of Kodak, while not welcome, is not the catastrophe many outsiders think it is.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/17/nyregion/despite-long-slide-by-kodak-rochester-avoids-decay.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/03/opinion/rochesters-survival-lessons.html
The upshot: Rochester is growing and thriving.
Rochester is growing and thriving.
I concur. The north side of the city is suffering and it shows. But compared to most of the rest of the country, and even the rest of New York, Rochester’s economy is doing remarkably well. The slow decay of several key businesses in Rochester has been ongoing for decades. Kodak contributed vast resources to the city. But Rochester watched it happening and responded. It remains a great city for technology, creativity, education.
Rochester also has one of the greatest Mac user groups in the country (I say with a conflict of interest, having been on its board).
With out evolution, you become extinct.
One day when all of us have tablets ala Star Trek PADD to do all our reading in, we won’t need to print documents out any more. In fact with my iPad I print 5% of the documents I used to – it’s much more convenient reading it on the iPad than on paper.
I foresee the day when HP’s print division will go down the drain with a great big sucking sound and HP, with the Microsoft ball & chain around its neck, will fall down from its pedestal like Kodak.
BLN, an old computer industry joke that affects your neighborhood:
They’ll invent a paperless office about the same time they invent a paperless bathroom.
Our network printers at work prints between 25k to 100k pages per printer annually. At home I have 3 network printers that are rarely used but I don’t think we’ll be paperless at work anytime soon.
I remember reading about the promise of the paperless office back in the late 1970’s. At the time, I had my first printer at home and I had to buy paper from specialist suppliers. These days, you buy printer paper in packs of 250 or 500 from any supermarket.
Far from being paperless, we seem to use much more of it.
I feel the same as I did when Joe’s Buggy Whip Inc. shut down.
This innovation bullshit will put us all out to pasture, sooner or later.
Kodak’s still around?
Seriously, though, that management team was comprised of a bunch of idiots since the mid-90s. They had every opportunity to ride the technology wave, and instead put their heads in the sand.
I feel bad for the trench workers at the company, but the executive teams got exactly what they deserved.
How much do you want to bet that those ass-wipe executives have a golden parachute while the grunts might be considered if they are offered COBRA at all.
Many years ago I worked on Kodak commercials for an instant film Polaroid-type camera that later was dropped when they were sued for patent infringement by Polaroid. Kodak consumer hardware was always lamely designed and built. They are the victim of astonishingly bad head-in-the-sand management.
Kodak had the ability to be at the forefront of digital cameras. They never invested in serious DSLR’s like everyone else and focused on simple, consumer type cameras and even on this focus, it was very weak. Kodak has made good cameras but
like Peter Blood says, think Kodak is a great company run by bad management.
Actually Kodak had some serious DSLR cameras way back. They were called DCS Pro SLR which used Nikon lenses and the cameras were essentially Nikon bodies. They (management) just didn’t have a clue what they had or what to do.
I am the owner of two Kodak “bridge” cameras. Both of them are very good cameras, especially in the light of the software that Kodak provides. Kodak is the only photography company. There are plenty of camera makers, but Kodak is the only end-to-end photography company, with equipment, software, printing, books, online storage, and accessories.
Indeed, try any of the other camera maker’s website and publications, and you will see the difference. Camera makers show photographs made with their own equipment, Kodak shows you how to make great photographs. I will agree, Kodak management dropped the ball-badly- in handling this market. Management couldn’t decide to make a clear effort at being the only photography company and promoting themselves as such, or just be another run of the mill digital camera maker.
Who?
Counting down slowly towards the final Kodak Moment…
Kodak makes cameras?
hey they have only stopped making digi cameras, not the end of the world , they still have a very profitable film arm unless their managagement kill that too !
elsewhere film sales are actually on the rise !
An era has ended. Still I am sad. Kodachrome changed my life and inspired me to become a professional advertising photographer for many years. I spent countless hours working in color and black and white darkrooms, and built a strong knowledge of the properties of film. So many wonderful memories.
Yet, it took only a portrait session at a Mac user group meeting to see the end was coming. I had a photo taken of me with a Hasselblad using a then revolutionary digital camera back that connected to a Mac running version 2 of Photoshop, outputting to a Kodak dye sublimation printer. The detail, resolution and ability to render accurate detail in deep shadows and extreme highlights shocked me – it far exceeded what we could expect from film. Right then and there, I knew film was obsolete, and pondered the future of Kodak.
The next day, I broke the news and showed a sample to a close friend, who managed the advertising photo studios for a major department store chain. His jaw dropped. I told him what he had to do: take the print I gave him to his corporate management, and urge them to make the jump to doing all the thousands of advertising and catalog photos taken in their studios to digital. He did exactly that. Within six months, most of the department store chain and its subsidiaries had converted from film to digital for their large format view cameras and the darkrooms were ripped out. The conversion cost well over a million dollars – and paid for itself in one year, because of the savings in pre-press costs.
Alongside every camera in each shooting bay was a Mac.
Kodak was the loser, Apple the winner. Times do change.
A fascinating documentary about Dwayne’s Photo, the last lab to develop Kodachrome:
http://gizmodo.com/5883480/the-last-photo-lab-to-develop-kodachrome
So many complex steps. Highly toxic chemicals. But it was all worth it. If you love photography, you must look at this video.
As a sidebar, whenever I used to hand process film, I always wore Platex rubber gloves. Then I learned how to process Ektachrome color transparency film in a hand processing line. The first time I tried it using Platex rubber gloves, they disintegrated almost instantly. I had to buy a set of felt-lined, chemically treated, super heavy rubber gloves, the kind used by mad scientists, to protect myself. The chemicals of color film processing were incredibly toxic.
In my mind Kodak stopped making cameras long ago.
Technically, that is correct. Back in the mid-1990s, Kodak retired so many people that it literally lost the knowhow of making cameras. The younger staff tried and FAILed. I was there to watch. That is why Kodak bought Chinon, who brought back camera technology to the company. IOW: Technically it is Chinon who has been making Kodak’s cameras.
Marketing-As-Management continues to weave its magic at Eastman Kodak. Another gear of industry comes to a grinding halt. 😯