Consider today the end of an era for one of the most iconic brands in the imaging industry. While their bankruptcy protection filing from last month signaled the need for some drastic action, it’s still a bit of a shock to see Kodak announce that they are putting all of their digital cameras, camcorders, and picture frames out to pasture.
When all is said and done, Kodak expects annual operating savings of around $100 million, but the bigger loss is going to be that of a cultural icon. Kodak will still exist, sure, but primarily as a purveyor of desktop printers as well as online and retail photo printing services.
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Poor Kodak. At this point, they’re just along for the ride. The last few years have been rough on them, and they’ve made a few big decisions that haven’t panned out. I must admit that while my unsolicited advice to them was sound, it probably would have to have been put in place a decade ago for them to have avoided the current state of things. As it is, the WSJ has word that they are planning to file Chapter 11 and do a court-supervised auction of their many digital imaging patents.
It’s sad, but the truth is that while Kodak is very much still a valuable company, it’s simply not a viable business any more. Their efforts to change the business they’re in came too late — and now they’re in the business of going under. → Read More
Kodak, which has been struggling to make enough money to keep the lights on next year, has sold its image sensor business. The buyer is holdings firm Platinum Equity, which is also picking up a large R&D and manufacturing facility in Rochester. Kodak will continue to have access to (and presumably operate) the facility and staff, but who will ultimately end up with this piece isn’t clear.
The price was not disclosed, but I would guess it’s probably somewhere around $100-$200 million, based on the scale of the purchase and the company’s year end estimates and necessities. The details of the deal are also obscure, and will likely come out in a press release during the next week. → Read More
Kodak, let us admit, is doomed. Founded over a century ago, it has dominated film for as long as film has existed, but now that film is on the verge of ceasing to exist, they have very little to dominate. They’re short on cash and while they deny plans to file for bankruptcy, many question whether they will have the luxury of choice a few years from now.
My first preference for the preservation of this company would be for them to sell off their patents and focus on film until they’re buried by progress. That’d be Kodak going out with its boots on, so to speak. But I doubt that’s going to happen.
What needs to happen instead is Kodak needs to abandon any pretense of being a household word. They’ve had a good run — for an entire century their name has been synonymous with film. But it will never be as recognizable again. So why throw money away on an entire division creating low-margin, unoriginal devices that are going to be obsolete in a few months and duplicated by pirate OEMs anyway? No, Kodak needs to go invisible. → Read More
Summer is here, and there’s a good chance some of you are thinking of picking up something to document your vacations with. iPhones and point-and-shoots are all well and good, but if you want to take it to the pool or the beach, it’s nice to feel sure that an errant splash isn’t going to disable your camera permanently. We’ve got a few water-hardened Flip-esque pocket cams here for you to choose from, but which deserves your hard-earned cash?
I’m not including image samples because to be honest, all these cameras have tiny sensors and small, weak lenses, which combine to produce noisy images with poor sharpness and so on. But they’re cheap and vacation-proof. You can’t have everything. Let’s take a look, shall we? → Read More
Short version: A tiny camera for tiny hands. It’s a good buy for kids and young ladies who can’t spare much purse space, though of course picture quality is nothing to brag about. → Read More
The big brand camera companies are committing seppuku in front of our eyes. It’s fascinating.
Last week, I bought a brand new Canon S95 camera. It’s a great point & shoot. Maybe the best out there right now. It captures beautiful 10-megapixel images. It’s great in low-light. It’s fast. And it shoots HD video. I anticipate I’ll take about 5 percent of my pictures with it in the coming year. The other 95 percent will be taken with my iPhone. How do I know? Because I had the S90 last year and that was my exact usage pattern.
Obviously, the 10-megapixel, $400 S95 is the superior camera when compared to the 5-megapixel, $200 (with subsidy) iPhone 4. But the fact that I always have my phone on me easily trumps the specs. But to me, there’s actually something other than just the portability factor that leads to my usage being so heavily skewed towards the iPhone: connectivity. → Read More
Your goal in school is to use your own printer as little as possible. Most schools have their own black and white printers on call 24/7 but sometimes you may need to print out a few snapshots for friends or a nice color cover for your last-minute essay on fish farming in ancient Mesopotamia as it relates to Shakespeare’s plays. My goal with creating this guide is to offer you a few fairly inexpensive options. I’ve also selected mostly all-in-one printers that will enable you to also scan documents and images. Bottom line: printers are “loss leaders” for most companies. They make most of their money on the toner and ink which, in the end, can sometimes cost more than the printer is worth. Your goal, then is, to find a printer with inexpensive ink. Kodak has made great strides in this and Espson is a close second. You don’t really need to worry about pages per minute – most of these printers are fast enough to pump out a few pages between classes. → Read More
This week at CrunchGear, we’re looking back at some of our favorite gadgets from the not-so-distant past — old phones, computers, media players, toys… those devices that still stand out in our memories despite their obsolescence. Feel free to contribute some of your own nostalgia. In 1999, I was into photography, but not seriously. I’d had the obligatory Kodak Instamatic, a couple of cheap 35mm pocket cameras, and I had fun taking snapshots. I never really took it seriously, though, until I saw some pictures that a co-worker had taken of a sunset. Then I just had to have a digital camera. But back in ’99, your options for digital cameras were somewhat limited. → Read More
Scrapbookin’ and it feels so good Short Version: Kodak knows how to make low-cost printers with plenty of great features. The 7250 is no exception. → Read More
Guess what the gadget fairy just brought? A box full of Kodak stuff! In there I found these items: Kodak Slice Kodak PlaySport Kodak M530 Kodak M580 Kodak Pulse digital frame → Read More
The International Trade Commission must have a pile of Apple-related complaints so high it can… reach some high place. A few months ago Nokia accused Apple of patent infringement, and now there’s word that Kodak and Research in Motion, or RIM as the cool kids say, have also filed a complaint. Kodak says parts of the iPhone’s interface infringe on Kodak patents relating to previewing images. → Read More
Eastman Kodak Company (in short, Kodak) has filed lawsuits against Apple and Research In Motion, alleging that both have infringed digital imaging technology patented by the company.
The complaint, filed with the U.S. International Trade Commission, claims that Apple’s iPhone devices and all RIM’s camera-enabled BlackBerry phones infringe a patent that covers technology related to a method for previewing images. Separately, Kodak filed two suits today against Apple that claim the infringement of patents related to digital cameras and certain computer processes.
In a statement, Kodak says it remains open to negotiating an agreement with both Apple and RIM, which it claims to have tried reaching for years. → Read More
We’ve always enjoyed Kodak’s pocket cams — compact, decent video, and solid price. The newest one is pretty awesome; I got to put my hands all over it last night and it has a good feel to it. It’s smaller, but feels more solid than the Zi6, Zi8, or Zx1. And of course it’s totally waterproof. They had it in a fish bowl and it functioned just fine. I don’t have fish, but I can think of some uses for this thing. → Read More
Kodak pretty much started the point and shoot camera market, but they’ve been behind for a while as far as innovation goes. In fact, this is pretty much an attempt to catch up with Nikon, Canon, and the other manufacturers who are using a touchscreen interface. → Read More
Imaging tech juggernaut Kodak is pretty keen on utilizing social media to connect with current and potential customers, boasting a presence on such sites as Facebook, YouTube and Flickr. The fact that it doesn’t own the @Kodak handle on Twitter hasn’t stopped them from being active on the popular micro-sharing service either, where marketers of the company and many of its international offices share all sorts of Kodak related stuff with their followers.
Of course, it’s only natural for a company like Kodak to share pictures with the community, and if you look closely you’ll see most of the Kodak accounts on Twitter use TweetPhoto to do so (e.g. @JeffreyHayzlett, CMO of Kodak). That’s not a coincidence. → Read More
Kodak: We’re the cheapest cost-per-page photo printers on the market! Look, here’s a whole bunch of independent research proving it! Nya-nya! Hewlett-Packard: NUH-UH! You’re a big fat liar, Kodak! We’re the cheapest cost-per-page. Kodak: Pfffft! Hewlett-Packard: Stop it! I’m telling! Hey CrunchGear! Kodak is being mean!! CrunchGear: What? Huh? Don’t make me stop this car! Full disclosure: Hewlett Packard’s PR team asked us to compare the HP C6380 against the Kodak ESP 7 with the intent of showing HP’s superior quality, in addition to evaluating the cost-per-page comparison. No gifts or money were given to me. I didn’t get to keep the printers, only the photos I printed out. → Read More
Pocket video cameras might eventually be killed off by the iPod horde, but that doesn’t mean that the current crop aren’t worth your time. The Kodak Zi6 HD is a nice little camera and Woot has a nice deal one ‘em today. → Read More
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