Having worked for many years in the photo industry, I can attest that the Kodak story is far more complex than most people realize. The company had an enormously profitable film and processing business, and a reasonably profitable business making cameras. All of this continued for decades after the first digital prototype was created in the early 1970s.
Kodak was not fundamentally an electronics company, and it had no expertise in producing the basic elements of digital photography -- image sensors and displays. Once these elements were in place, in the 1990s, Kodak was an active participant in the digital photography market.
Eventually the film market withered, although it has never died. Meanwhile, the digital photo field has produced relatively meager profits for the many companies involved, some of which eventually sold their interests or dropped out entirely. Even Fujifilm makes most of its profits from Instax cameras and (especially) instant film, rather than its digital models. (Kodak was forbidden by a Supreme Court decision from making instant film.)
So should Kodak have endangered its cash cow by plowing resources into digital? I don't think the answer is at all obvious.
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Having worked for many years in the photo industry, I can attest that the Kodak story is far more complex than most people realize. The company had an enormously profitable film and processing business, and a reasonably profitable business making cameras. All of this continued for decades after the first digital prototype was created in the early 1970s. Kodak was not fundamentally an electronics company, and it had no expertise in producing the basic elements of digital photography -- image sensors and displays. Once these elements were in place, in the 1990s, Kodak was an active participant in the digital photography market. Eventually the film market withered, although it has never died. Meanwhile, the digital photo field has produced relatively meager profits for the many companies involved, some of which eventually sold their interests or dropped out entirely. Even Fujifilm makes most of its profits from Instax cameras and (especially) instant film, rather than its digital models. (Kodak was forbidden by a Supreme Court decision from making instant film.) So should Kodak have endangered its cash cow by plowing resources into digital? I don't think the answer is at all obvious.
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Link to comment from June 7, 2025