The End of a Kodak Era

This week Kodak announced that it was getting out of the camera business in order to save money.  No, that’s not a typo.  The company that brought photography to the masses in 1884 is exiting the business.

Kodak did not invent the camera.  Cameras were around for decades before.  In fact, the first known photograph dates back to 1825.  For the next 60 years, large box cameras were used to expose light onto glass or metal plates that were coated with light-sensitive materials, making it a very time intensive and laborious process.  Taking photographs often involved a strong-willed photographer, a couple of Sherpas, and a mule train to carry all the equipment.

What George Eastman did when he patented roll film in 1885 was to make it easier for everyday people to take photographs, without Sherpas or mule teams.  He coined the phrase “YouPush the Button, We Do the Rest”, which described the process by which a camera owner would send the whole camera back to Kodak when the roll was completely shot, and Kodak would process the film, make prints, and load film back in the camera, which it would then return to the owner.

Kodak started making cameras in 1891, introduced the No.2 Brownie in 1903 (which basically invented the photography enthusiast), and invented the first digital camera by Steve Sasson in 1975.

Fast-forward all the way to 1999, when I worked in Kodak Professional, testing the DCS professional digital cameras.  Kodak would buy camera bodies from Canon and Nikon and strip out all the film parts and replace them with all the digital components.  Half the Canon cameras would have a Kodak logo on them and were sold by Kodak, and half got the Canon logo and were sold by Canon.  Likewise with the Nikon cameras.

These cameras were the best digital cameras in the world.  I remember watching events like the Super Bowl, and noticed that at least 90% of the photographers on the sidelines were using Kodak cameras.  Only a photography geek would notice that, although I apologize to no one for that.  The cameras were also used by photojournalists all over the world, who happily used the amazing 2-megapixel cameras and could send photos all over the world…within hours…not days as with film.  We laugh at that now...but at the time, they were the cat's pajamas.

I also worked on the DCS Pro Back system, which was a 16-megapixel back that would fit on a medium format camera.  The camera back was amazing, but at $10,000, you weren’t expecting to sell a lot of them.  I felt very fortunate to be able to use that system, knowing that it was going to go into the hands of the best commercial photographers in the world.

In 2001 or 2002, Nikon introduced their own digital SLR camera.  Although it didn’t have all the bells and whistles, it was priced at about half of what the Kodak cameras were selling for.  I remember it being really quiet around the Kodak offices for almost a week.  As other camera manufacturers came up to speed on digital technology, other cameras came to market.  None of them had the quality of the Kodak digital SLRs, but they were good enough for the common man.  Sales of the Kodak cameras dropped, and Kodak Professional stopped making professional digital SLRs in 2005.  And this week, the announcement came that consumer cameras would no longer be made.

It is the end of an era.  I have a collection of old Kodak cameras, some dating back to the 1920s.  As a Rochester resident, the home of Kodak, we lived and breathed Kodak cameras our whole lives….for the better part of 120 years.  Until this week.  Now we get to witness Kodak moving off in another direction.