The death of Kodak

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Kelly
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When the announcement for that camera came out, I was speechless. Perhaps it's just the locals here who understand what a joke the Kodak name is now. I have a number of factors that tug at me to support the Kodak name to its death, but I just can't do it. :cry:

I took photos of everything Kodak related I came across in Europe. That's on my list of stuff to assemble and post.



Kodak’s Problem Child
How the blue-chip company was bankrupted by one of its own innovations

Rochester, New York — The cold hits me as soon as I leave the Amtrak station, stepping into a swirl of snow eddies that etch the low streets in black and white.

The terminal sits just outside the city center. In the short car ride into town, one building stands out to me from all the others. It is an impressive beaux arts landmark with five large letters, glowing in red, resting at the top:

K-O-D-A-K
George Eastman invented casual photography here in the 1880s, made a fortune, and built a small town into a city. Millions of people around the world “pressed the button” and for more than a hundred years, Kodak “took care of the rest.”

At its peak, in 1996, Kodak was rated the fourth-most-valuable global brand. That year, the company had about two-thirds of the global photo market, annual revenues of $16 billion, and a market capitalization of $31 billion. At the time of its peak local employment, in 1982, the company had over 60,000 workers in Rochester, most of whom worked in Kodak Park, as it’s known to employees and locals. The campus, a private city within the city, sprawled over 120 acres with its own power plant and fire department, once stood as a monument of imaging and innovation. Today it still stands, but vastly scaled back from the days when film production was at the core of Kodak’s work......
The rest: https://medium.com/editors-picks/3e1d3fc4a3e
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Matt
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Kodak still has one of the most recognizable brand names in the world. It's probably their most valuable asset at this point.
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Kelly
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Kodak bankruptcy likely comes to end Tuesday
Recent years have not been kind to Eastman Kodak Co.

And its Chapter 11 bankruptcy of the past 20 months has marked the lowest of its low points. But that long day’s journey into night comes to an end Tuesday when the company is expected to officially emerge from bankruptcy.

That emergence — approved by U.S. Bankruptcy Court last month — triggers a slew of major events for the company. All of Kodak’s old stock effectively ceases to exist. A new generation of stock shares will be created and go to entirely different investors, for the most part. Kodak’s board gets replaced with a nine-person board, two-thirds of which is new. Its Document Imaging and Personalized Imaging businesses become the property of the pension fund covering Kodak’s United Kingdom workforce. As part of that transaction, roughly 3,200 Kodak workers, including 700 locally, will work instead for that pension fund.

That emergence also means Kodak is no longer under the supervision of U.S. Bankruptcy Court and the scrutiny of the U.S. Trustee. “You have layers and layers of supervision and oversight and — here’s the big one — expenses that are gone,” said Robert Rock, senior counsel with the bankruptcy practice at Albany law firm Tully Rinckey PLLC. “There is kind of a ‘Prometheus unbound’ existence when you emerge.”
More here: http://www.democratandchronicle.com/art ... bankruptcy
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Matt
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Focusing on printing? I give them 5 years.
Really Kodak? You think the future is people printing shit out on paper?

This is what Kodak should stick to:
Medical imaging - This is the future of imaging. don't spin off another Carestream. Become Carestream.
Film and print restoration (digitally) - Support those billions of images you helped create, by creating and selling tools to get them scanned, color corrected, restored and digitized in albums.
Batteries - With your history of Camera Batteries you can get into and innovate in this area.
High end sensors - You did it for NASA. Do it for the movie industry.
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Matt
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Truesense imaging announced a new 4k sensor, one that could possibly be a standard for inexpensive micro4/3 cinema cameras.
Truesense used to the be Image Sensor division of Kodak, but was sold off in 2011. Oh well. At least they are still located in Rochester

http://www.eoshd.com/content/11193/true ... mos-sensor

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/74438041[/vimeo]
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Matt
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New line of KODAK lenses for m4/3 announced (made in asia)
Image
- Kodak 8mm f/3.0 fisheye
- Kodak 25mm f/0.95
- Kodak 50mm f/1.1
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Des219
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I thought I just read that Kodak is completely dropping their camera and accessory line?
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Des219 wrote:I thought I just read that Kodak is completely dropping their camera and accessory line?
In the USA.
These lenses are actually being made by the one of the company that manufacurered Kodak cameras. They are just going on their own and using the kodak name.

if the quality if good, I'll be picking up one.
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