Kodak About To Emerge From Bankruptcy

It is a sad thing to see a great company to have to file bankruptcy because they were slow to adapt to new innovations and trends.

Such was the case of the Eastman Kodak Company.

According to an article posted by The Japan Times:

Many of its products and services are gone, including the camera-making business that made it famous more than a century ago. Also gone are scores of workers, manufacturing facilities, supply contracts and millions of dollars in investments.

The article begins with the statement that the company doesn't look a whole lot like it did when it entered into bankruptcy. In order to get its financial house in order, Kodak had to slim down and close down a lot of its product divisions.

The company hopes to emerge from bankruptcy as early as September 3.

The advent of digital cameras have made emulsion film nearly obsolete. Kodak was slow to get in on the digital bandwagon, with disastrous results. I remember the news of the day was the constant competition between Kodak and Fuji Film of Japan and who made the better film.

As the article pointed out:

Founded by George Eastman in 1880, Eastman Kodak Co. is credited with popularizing photography at the start of the 20th century and was known all over the world for its Brownie and Instamatic cameras and its yellow-and-red film boxes. It was first brought down by Japanese competition and then an inability to keep pace with the shift from film to digital technology.

I personally owned two Kodak camera. One was a Kodak Instamatic 104 in the mid-1960s (it was stolen from my high school photography classroom) and the other was a Kodak Pocket Instamatic 20 in the 1970s. I gave that one to my parents when I switched to 35mm.

Above, a Kodak Instamatic 104 camera set.  

The new Kodak will concentrate on the "commercial imaging industry, providing professional services such as commercial printing, packaging and film for motion pictures."  (It'll be interesting to see how the motion picture film division will fare since digital technology has been replacing motion picture film.)