This is the instruction manual for the Kodak Petite camera, which was made between 1929 and 1933. It shoots 127 film, and came in five different colors.
(via KEH Camera Blog)
Image credit: Photograph by BlondeShot Creative and used with permission
Here’s an interesting portrait of Steven Sasson by David Friedman, shot at Kodak’s headquarters in Rochester, New York. Sasson invented the digital camera as a Kodak engineer back in 1975, and provides an interesting glimpse in this video into how that first camera worked.
Editor’s note: This is our first press release published in accordance with the terms of our acquisition by Eastman Kodak, which was announced earlier today.
Rochester, NY, March 28 — Kodak’s Russell Hunt has earned recognition as a 2011 Channel Chief by Everything Channel’s CRN for the second consecutive year. Notably, Hunt has led the successful channel integration of two existing channel communities within Kodak. Through Hunt’s leadership efforts, Kodak expands its channel capabilities to provide customer-focused applications across a broad range of vertical industries.
With its photography-related businesses struggling and no end in sight to its stock’s free fall, Kodak is turning to patent infringement lawsuits as a way to generate revenue. The company is currently in a patent dispute with Apple (iPhone) and RIM (Blackberry) over a patent it holds for previewing image on camera phones, and hopes to generate over $1 billion in royalty revenues if it comes out victorious. Previously Kodak had used this same patent to win nearly $1 billion from Samsung and LG.
Of the $7.2 billion in revenues Kodak generated in 2010, $838 million was from patent royalties. Somehow this doesn’t seem like a sustainable strategy for the company to stop being “Apple in reverse”.
(via Bloomberg)
Image credit: Fight Night Punch Test by djclear904
Did you know that some of Kodak’s early DSLR cameras had built-in games? Before Canon and Nikon started making homegrown DSLRs, they actually started by partnering with Kodak in combing their camera bodies with Kodak sensors and electronics. For some strange awesome reason, the firmware developers decided to add games to a number of the models. The Pong game shown in the video above is found on the Kodak DCS 560. Too bad neither Canon nor Nikon continued this awesome feature once they started developing their own cameras.
MarketWatch has an interesting article titled “Kodak Is Apple In Reverse” that compares Kodak’s meteoric fall with Apple’s meteoric rise. Back in 1997, Kodak was a $28 billion dollar company while Apple was worth a measly $2 billion. Now Apple is one of the most valuable companies in the world (currently worth $330 billion), and earns enough profit every quarter ($6 billion) to buy Kodak… six times over!
Kodak also had a 100+ year head-start in selling cameras (they first started selling portable cameras 123 years ago), but only sold 10.5 million digital cameras last year compared to the 16 million sold by Apple via their iPhone. Oh how the mighty have fallen!
Kodak Is Apple In Reverse (via Photo Rumors)
Image credit: by hundrednorth
What you see here is the history of Kodak stock starting from 1978. In the mid-1990s the stock peaked at over $90 per share, but has experienced a slow demise since then, and is currently at $3.70 a share. What’s more, the company just announced yesterday that profits fell a staggering 95% in the fourth quarter of 2010. During that quarter the company earned just $22 million, compared to the $443 million it earned during the same period a year earlier.
Acquisition rumors have been swirling around for quite some time now as the stock continues its free fall. Any predictions on what will become of this once-great company?
Kodak profit plunges 95%; sales fall short (via Photo Rumors)
Update: Kodak still sees a “big silver lining” amidst all this bad news.
A couple days ago we featured a video showing how memory cards are made, and now here’s an older video about an older medium. It’s a short documentary created back in 1958 showing how Kodak creates its film. The narration is in Dutch, but there’s English subtitles.
Read more…
Yesterday the last certified Kodachrome processing facility — Dwayne’s Photo in Parsons, Kansas — finally stopped supporting the legendary film. They decided to create a t-shirt for mourning photo-geeks that sports the classic Kodachrome colors. If you’d like this tiny slice of Kodachrome history, you can get it for $13 over at Dwayne’s Photo.
After Kodak announced the end of Kodachrome’s production in June of 2009, the number of photo labs that developed the film began to dwindle until finally only Dwayne’s Photo in Parsons, Kansas remained as the lone certified Kodachrome processing facility in the world. Today, they will be processing their last roll of Kodachrome, bringing the film’s storied career in the photo industry to an end. CBS News Sunday Morning did a neat feature looking back on the popular film.
