Posted on 03/01/2012 5:37:59 PM PST by SWAMPSNIPER
Kodak, the company that invented the first digital camera back in 1975, announced today that it is pulling out of the camera market entirely. The phasing out of digital cameras, pocket video cameras, and digital picture frames will likely happen by the end of June. Instead, the company will be focusing on licensing out its patents and brand name (much like Polaroid does), and on inkjet photo printing. Although Kodak wasn’t a big player in the digital camera space, it was once a dominant camera maker in the days of film. The original Kodak Brownie helped popularize consumer photography and introduced the concept of the snapshot.
(Excerpt) Read more at petapixel.com ...
Bummer. Printer business ain’t doing too good either, as fewer people print their pitchers.
An era gone by.... I still have a kodak brownie that belonged to my parents.
Stay safe swampsniper !
Still have my Dad’s Kodak Pony and some Kodachrome color slides taken around 1955.
SwampSniper, what’s your preferred image capture? Print Film? Slide Film? Digital?
I spent a great many weekends for many years, hiking and photographing landscapes in the Ohio Valley, the Midwest, the Shenandoah Valley, Smokey Mountains, and elsewhere. While I never captured the quality images that I see in your posts, I enjoyed it very much; ultimately doing my own color developing and printing.
I’ve been a Canon AE1P fan for a long, long time, but made the switch to digital several years ago. There is something to be said for the immediacy of digital, but I don’t know that I have the appreciation for the prints that I have for prints from actual film.
To see Kodak exit this market is truly momentous. An era is surely ending.
When I'm seriously looking for photos I take the Sony A200 DSLR.
Kodak was fat, dumb and happy for a long time. I was a photo hobbyist in 1975, doing darkroom work and taking tons of photos. I thought I was on top of all the developments in the photography market, but I cannot recall any publicity for the 1975 development of the first digital camera. I know they made the decision to keep quiet about it out of a desire not to cannibalize their film sales - but come on, at some point you develop it as an applied technology in parallel to film-based photography, if only to have a head-start when the shift happened. I guess that didn’t occur to them. Doh!
I would say that they should have kept up, innovative companies fail too and GM sould have!
I bought a digital Kodak a few years back. It’s since disappeared.
But when I bought it, I made a point of going up and down the aisle, comparing the features/specs of every digital camera and what the prices were. That Kodak camera was the best value.
It worked great. I bought some extra memory, it could store a thousand or so pictures.
It also could take videos.
The longest video it would hold would be I think about and hour and a half.
I could take the memory stick out, and stick it into a USB port on a computer, and it would look like a device/directory with files in it. Windows or unix.
Too bad they didn’t keep their eye on the ball businesswise, they had great products, IMHO.
I’m not sure how much actual input had in the design of recent cameras, other than some gimmicks like “Easy Share”. I heard a lot of their products were made by Seagull, O.K., but not an actual Kodak factory.
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