Kodak, perhaps the photography company, appears to have filed for bankruptcy.
It seems to be something of a representative for the state of the non-digital photography market, which looks pretty much dead except for a few limited areas.
In recent years they seem to have sold off much of the research and development and focused on the hyper-competitive desktop inkjet printer market instead.
(Although the reasons for this decision still remain a mystery to me)
I remember having a kodak camera with kodak film, that got photos printed on kodak photo paper, but I guess people a bit younger than me might never have even seen a roll of film, nor for that matter a kodak camera.
It’s sad to see this happen to such an iconic company and I hope that things don’t turn out badly for the employees.
They also appeared to be making a something of name for themselves in the commercial print industry. I don’t know how much of their business that accounted for however.
Something else that surprised me – Kodak were the inventors of OLED, yet they sold the last of their OLED division to LG in 2009. A number of the R&D staff in that field also left to form the American firm Emagin, which supplies OLED heads up displays to the military and medical sectors.
I guess Kodak is a bit like Xerox, original developers of lots of stuff that other people ended up making a success.
I didn’t know they invented OLED, nor about the commercial printing. I tended to think of them as just cameras + film.
I wonder if they’d hung on to these divisions, would they be more or less successful today?