Disc film, a replacement to the very popular Instamatic camera line, but was unsuccessful, possibly due to the complexity of the film system and the very small negative size;.
APS Advanced Photo System , designed to provide a more user-friendly system for snapshot photography. A joint effort between many large photographic companies, it failed due to the rapid growth of the digital imaging market. It has been said that Eastman Kodak also failed to realize the potential of the digital imaging boom in the late s.
This is somewhat true, as Kodak did not begin to market digital cameras until the market was established. Kodak also applied its vast knowledge of photographic print displays to the inkjet and digital photographic printing field. Growth in Kodak digital imaging notwithstanding, Kodak's worldwide employment base has shrunk dramatically since the s 2 , felt especially in Rochester where Kodak had been the top employer for many years.
The business model was simple: Distribute tens of millions of cheap cameras—at times even giving them to children for free—and create lifelong customers for the far more lucrative product, film.
And wealth made Kodak ambitious. The most famous recording of John F. Read: The summer of Super 8, and its technological origins.
Many of those images depicted the adventurous and still-mysterious West. In the famous Kodak episode of Mad Men , which aired in , the ad guru Don Draper wows his clients by coming up with the name for the Kodak Carousel slide projector, filling it with photos of his own gorgeous family and reciting a dictionary definition of nostalgia as he flicks through them.
The Kodak mythology, though powerful, was and is easily seen through. The landscapes were wonderful. But in their obviousness I think they were even more very American than they looked: Nobody was really duped, but at some level people wanted to be, or at least they had to concede that the effect was impressive.
In Rochester, Kodak was nothing less than the 20th century itself. Kodak Tower, a story neo-Renaissance skyscraper, was the gilded beacon of downtown. By the postwar period, the company had developed a reputation for generosity toward its employees, paying health-care costs not just for retirees but for their entire families, as well as subsidizing advanced degrees, providing mortgage loans, and organizing employee sports leagues.
From the May issue: Photography in the age of falsification. For a long time, the prosperity looked like it would hold. In , as Kodak was skidding through a significant rough patch, an employee named Robert J. There had been several rounds of layoffs throughout the decade, including a cut of 4, jobs in alone. A briefly promising union-organizing effort, led by the International Union of Electrical Workers, petered out, as employees expressed fear of retaliation by an openly anti-union company.
But to the extent that Rochester residents expressed distress about any of this, they focused their ire on specific executives, never on the company itself. This would soon reveal itself as a miscalculation. In , the year I was born, the blood was in the water.
Then it laid off another 10, As consumers moved beyond film photography and started to favor digital, Kodak was slow to adapt. But Kodak was reluctant.
You could never project a financial business model that was superior to photographic film. And it failed to rearrange its business model to make the new cameras profitable.
Read: What killed Kodak? By the time Kodak filed for bankruptcy, in , it employed just over 5, people in Rochester. Soon that number was cut in half. Retirees lost their health care, and many of them lost their pension. Remaining employees could look forward only to more layoffs, and local nonprofits and cultural institutions had to think of someplace else to approach for support. Kodak has since made many efforts to come back: Leaning into commercial printers. Selling off patents. Trying to break into the smartphone game , and then trying again, but uglier.
The Kodak Ektra, announced in , was a smartphone that was supposed to look like a camera from Neither does the CEO who hired her. Kodak continues to sell film, but now it calls itself a chemical company. Its pared-down workforce focuses primarily on commercial printing everything from newspapers to food packaging and, to a lesser extent, on an array of specialty products: X-ray films; fabric coatings; antimicrobial materials; and, more recently, films that can be used to manufacture printed circuit boards, like the ones in ventilators.
It also sells film for the type of high-altitude cameras that can be used in reconnaissance planes. Former employees still pine for that Kodak, some of them gathering in Facebook groups to reminisce. It was the only employer she ever had. Essie Calhoun-McDavid worked at Kodak from to She rose up the ranks to become vice president of community affairs before she retired.
She saw a lot of layoffs over the years. She was excited when she heard the announcement. My job is to be a little bullish on the economy, but with what I see every day, I really think that it is exciting," Senall said. The company is a minute drive from downtown. Tom Slechta, Videk's CEO, sits on a chair surrounded by tech trinkets, cameras and rolls of fake checks inside his manufacturing room.
The company produces machine vision automated inspection. In other words, his team of engineers, developers and "solution architects" create software and custom-rig digital cameras and other technology to scan the integrity of labels, checks, bank statements, packages and more. Slechta said his business partners include the Treasury Department, the U. Postal Service, Kodak,. HPQ Report. An example to illustrate the process, Slechta said, is with its automated inspection of Treasury checks.
Another way to explain the process is if a financial institution wants to be sure the bank statement of John Doe actually gets mailed to John Doe and not Jane Doe, they go to Videk. The company was spun out of Kodak more than thirty years ago, and some of the engineers who still work there today had helped build the division when it was part of Kodak.
Slechta, who has a bio-medical background, said. Soon, though, he left the eye care company and headed for Videk after it spun out of Kodak. When asked about Videk's use of cameras and its ties to Kodak, Slechta said Kodak came to them in the late 80s to help design and develop an industrial camera using its megaplus pixels sensor elements.
The trial didn't work at the time as the cameras were worth thousands of dollars, but Slechta said it was a good idea for Kodak to prototype the function and see what they could do with it. Beyond Videk's digital cameras, former Kodak employees and status as a former Kodak division, you can find the former photographic filmmaker's footprint in the smallest places at this smaller firm. There's an entire wall in the manufacturing room that has drawers devoted to various trinkets -- bolts and screws, as well as electronic parts -- used for the verification systems.
The drawers, though, are labeled with "K-" and then a number. Slechta said that's how Kodak categorized parts. Videk still uses the same system. A reawakening of Kodak's sprawling Eastman Business Park could be an added tailwind for the city and its entrepreneurs.
The deal, agreed in Kodak's bankruptcy process and supported by New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, could restart some of the park's industrial capability and attract new businesses. Kodak, which is poised to exit bankruptcy in the third quarter, meanwhile, believes it can attract new talent to the company as it pursues higher growth markets that could support rising earnings.
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