For a company that spawned a the saying “Kodak Moment”, that reflects a situation that just shouted photograph me. Kodak have fallen on rough ground. Despite actually inventing the digital camera in the 1970’s they failed to capitalise on this, and focused instead on film technology.
Sadly in todays society film is dead. We all have (well most people have) a camera on there phone and the ability to publish those images to social media at the touch of a button. Last year iPhone overtook all other cameras as the source of the most unploaded photos to flickr.
I can remember Kodak from my youth, and more recently in the late 1990’s and early naughties when using my SLR. Kodak have over 1100 patents, but sadly it seems that despite having many ideas and inventions, few are relevent in the modern digital age. I doubt many of us could have forecast the rapid boom of the digital age. I recently tried to get a decent slide scanned for Climber, and it took Ray Wood a good few hours to scan and process 9 images, which were so poor they could only be used as small images. Sadly the art of processing film and scanning slides is dead in the water, given you can now get a small pro-sumer digi camera capable of producing good enough images for print media.
News from New York is that Kodak may well be filing for bankrupcy in the near future. Sad days, will the CEO have a final ‘Kodak Moment’?