Kodak files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy

Sad day indeed. The long rumored bankruptcy filing by Eastman Kodak happened today. Nice article by USA Today. I know I'll date myself, but who else remembers using lead lined bags to carry film through an airport so that the x-ray machine wouldn't fog your high-speed film?

This doesn't surprise me really

They have been in trouble for a while I believe.
Can't imagine how many Kodachrome rolls I've gotten over the years.

It is too bad. We used to go to the Kodak offices in Hollywood and buy or reserve bricks of Kodachrome all with the same emulsion and batch number to ensure consistency between rolls. I sure don't miss those processing and developing costs though. We'd come back from a shoot with 60-100 rolls of film that all had to be processed. Ouch $

Things have changed a lot. I started as a photo assistant and part of my job was to do focus checks and refocus to ensure sharp images, also I sat next to the photographer and would hand bracket. As he shot I would have to move the aperture dial up and down 1 1/2 stops in 1/2 stop increments each frame as he would blast away with the motor drive. Another assistant would load the next body with film and take the exposed film and number the canister with a sharpie pen and log each roll into a notebook before we put it in the lead bag...

Personally I am happy for all the new technology

Still remember my Kodak Disc4000.
1 disc, 15 exposures. What an odd number...

I opened the second One hour photo lab in the state of Alabama. Went from there to managing 100 labs and then owning two of my own. Sold out when I got a glimpse of the future. Got out before every Drug store and grocery store and WalMart in the country bought a cheep one hour lab. I have seen enough film to last me several lifetimes. Glad to see digital firmly rooted.

Kodak is probably the best example of a company commiting protracted suicide.

I have never seen a company try harder to fail in spite of having a dominant position in any industry.

And their customer service set new standards for crap.

Personally, I will not be missing them. They did it to themselves.

Carolina Photo Guy said:

Kodak is probably the best example of a company commiting protracted suicide.

I have never seen a company try harder to fail in spite of having a dominant position in any industry.

And their customer service set new standards for crap.

Personally, I will not be missing them. They did it to themselves.

Click to expand...

I totally agree. Self inflicted suicide by a company that refused to advance with the times and newer and better technology. As Pete said, I won't be missing them at all.

Obir said:

Still remember my Kodak Disc4000.
1 disc, 15 exposures. What an odd number...

Click to expand...

And what about the "Magicube flash", 4 in one. When that came out on the instamatic, they did sell a whole bunch.

Ahh, the flash cube. How many burned fingers...
I remember seeing them littering the ground on popular photo spots.

I agree with what Pete says "they did it to theirselves" but I am not so sure about the suicide idea. Here is why...yes Kodak did develop the first digital camera and they did make digital cameras from day one of the digital age, but and it is a huge but too, their main money maker for a really long time was film...they hadn't led in camera manufacturing per se since the explosion of 35mm format. Along came Leica and Zeiss and Nippon kokguru or whatever Nikons original name was and Canon and Pentax and on and on and on...so you see they began to concentrate on film big time by the 50s. In '75 when Steven Sasson who was a ripe 25 years old and working in some obscure engineering department at Kodak started the project that led to the first digital camera. They shelved the idea at the time because film was making record profits for the company...why shoot themselves in the foot right? That strategy was sound and held for many years until early 90's when digital technology became practical and affordable...remember even as late as 1991 Kodak released the very first DSLR called the DCS which was a Nikon F3 that was tethered to rather large box like structure that housed the processor. The F3 used a specially modified back that was rated at 1 megapixel...it cost 20 grand! 1991! OK 5 years later in 95 Apple decides they want to build a digital camera they design it Kodak manufactures it and brands their own version of it...a few megapixels color and it goes for under a 1000 bucks...one of the first "consumer" digital cameras available...1995...

They couldn't read the writing on the wall...film was obsolete...or maybe they could read it crystal clear...back in 95 I think they felt they could ride it out for another ten years and they made it 15...also the media is not really telling the whole story...Kodak for a long time has really been sort of two companies one the chemical part and the other film and camera division...well the chemical part has been the most profitable segment of the company for a long long time...it was spun off from the main company a few years ago...it is safe.

They have a buttload of patents which they are going to get huge bucks for...they're going to be just fine...it's all a bunch of hoopla and all of you guys oughtta know this better than most...Kodak is bankrupt. Big frigging whoop! Film is obsolete so it makes perfect sense that a company that makes film will fail.

You all know me to be a film shooter. Well if you ask me I could care less Kodak went kaput I'll still be able to get film for a long long time yet...

What no bailout like the banks and auto industry? Can't our goverment buy barges full of film and dump it in the ocean like we do with grain? Or subsidies like diary farmers? There must be a way to sustain this obsolete business so it can fail at a later date

Burned fingers and retinas I had a photo job a long time ago at SeaWorld to shoot pics from there "Picture Spots" to show what people could capture. We went in before the park was open in the morning and there were many, many flashcubes on the ground. I did another shoot for Pentax to show off their auto focus so we took a bunch of extras to Magic Mountain and made them ride the roller coaster over and over while we shot. We were able to get inside the restricted area of the coaster to shoot.... What di we find on the ground there tons of broken sunglasses and baseball caps

Rochester NY is an interesting American story...man builds photographic and chemical company empire makes a crazy fortune becomes philanthropic builds a giant university in Rochester a big hospital etc...endows it...then tells everyone he has did everything he could and blows his brains out! Yikes!

Kodak did good in it's time lots of job lots of money made lots and lots of memories recorded around the world...Now the biggest employer in Rochester is that same school that Kodak built and that ain't a bad thing at all...they had a damn good run...

Flashcubes and burned fingers - remember the burned foreheads? Numbnuts held the camera backwards and scorched a third eye into their foreheads.