Old Kodak Digital Camera Models

[Narkis Eatman]

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Eastman Kodak Co., of Rochester, New York, is an American film maker and camera maker. For at least three quarters of the 20th century it played the dominant role in worldwide photography business.

In 1879 George Eastman, amateur photographer and employee of a bank in Rochester, had invented an emulsion-coating machine for mass production of dry plates and got a patent on it in England. In 1881 he and Rochester's local buggy whip manufacturer Henry A. Strong founded the Eastman Dry Plate Company in the town in the north of the state of New York (USA).

In 1883, a year after having solved troubles with bad quality gelatine that spoiled film plates, the company moved to a four-story building which later got the address 343 State Street, longtime headquarters address of the company. In 1884 Eastman and Strong transformed their partnership to a corporation for which they gathered the first shareholders. In 1885 the American Film was introduced, a paper roll film which needed a special development process, made usable with the new Eastman-Walker rollfilm holder. This was used later in the first two Kodak cameras. However Eastman knew that he needed a transparent film for the future, and hired the chemist Henry H. Reichenbach as research scientist. The transparent roll film would be delivered in 1889.

Eastman's goal in life was to simplify and to popularize photography. The first step towards that goal was the "Kodak" camera he introduced in 1888 which had a built-in 100-exposure paper roll film costing $25, a huge amount. The box camera had to be sent back to the factory once all the exposures had been used. The customers got their cameras back with new film roll loaded into it, and the image prints. In 1890 a Kodak folding camera with built-in 48 exposure film roll followed. After years of advertising the brand Kodak the company was renamed Eastman Kodak Co. In 1900 Eastman had reached his goal, offering the Brownie rollfilm camera which cost only $1 including a 6 exposure film. Further film rolls cost just 15 cents. The Brownie camera series was continued until 1970.

Kodak used to have autonomous branches in other countries, which developed their own lines of products, as Ford did for cars. The German branch Kodak AG, which made the famous Retina models, is discussed in a separate page, as is Kodak Ltd. (UK).

At its peak Kodak's international plants were:

With exception of the Mexican plant all these international branches made cameras. Most U.S. plants outside Rochester specialized in producing basic materials like gelatine (Peabody/Massachusetts), plastics (Longview/Texas), chemicals (Batesville/Arkansas), polyester fibre (Columbia/S.C.), and basic materials for film making and others (Kingsport/Tennessee). Some of the films and plates were made in Windsor/Colorado.

At its peak, the company was huge and made everything connected with photography: cameras, lenses (including some of the best lenses of the mid-20th century, see Kodak lenses), film, and processing chemicals and equipment, in addition to photographic materials used in the graphic arts industry (for example, for printing). It also conducted important photographic research and development. 60,000 people were working for Kodak in Rochester. In 1966 the company had 100,000 employees worldwide.

The most popular Kodak cameras were the ones for 126 film cartridges. The first of these cameras was launched in 1963. By 1976, 60 million Instamatic cameras had been sold, six times more than all competitors put together had sold of this camera type, and also six times more than Kodak's previous big success, the Brownie Star camera series (10 million Starflex, Starmite, and Starflash sold, made from 1957 to 1962). Another huge success was achieved with Kodak's type 110 pocket film cartridges and pocket cameras which were introduced in 1972. But this time other companies took a larger share of the market by abandoning their own miniature film formats and introducing smart pocket cameras for 110 film instead. Kodak's decline began when it flopped with another miniature film format, the disc film, in the 1980s.

In the late 1970s, Kodak developed instant cameras and a new Instant Picture system, in competition with Polaroid. This led to lawsuits, resulting in a loss for Kodak. Damages of over $900 million were awarded to Polaroid[3].

In 1975 electronics engineer Steven Sasson developed Kodak's first digital still camera (for 0.1 megapixel black&white exposures), based on CCD technology. Kodak didn't pay much attention to this invention as their main focus was film. In 1994 they helped Apple develop and market the Quick Take 100 and 150 digital cameras while Kodak's focus in the digital camera section was aimed at reporters and journalists (Kodak DCS series). Consumer digital cameras were marketed from 1995 on under the brand Kodak (Kodak DC40). In August 2006 they abandoned the production of digital cameras by outsourcing the production to Flextronics, an all-and-everything OEM manufacturer in Singapore.

By the 1980s, Kodak's dominant position in photography had begun to erode for a variety of reasons, including more aggressive marketing from Fuji and the rise of sophisticated 35mm point and shoot cameras from Japanese manufacturers[4]. Years of steady profits had led to a conservative, risk-averse management style. During the 2000s, mass photography shifted overwhelmingly to digital cameras, which put sales of Kodak's traditional film, paper, and chemistry into a steep dive. Despite shedding many products (such as black & white enlarging paper and Kodachrome film), by 2011 the company had become a consistent money-loser. A last-ditch effort to sell off the company's war chest of patents (many involving digital imaging) did not meet with much success; and on January 19th, 2012 the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection[5]. In January of 2013, JK Imaging Ltd. is licensing the Kodak brand for consumer digital camera products[6]. In April of 2013, the personalized imaging and document imaging businesses divisions were acquired by Kodak's UK Pension Plan (KPP).[7] The acquisition will be under the name Kodak Alaris.[8] They will be using the Kodak branding for consumer and professional films along with retail photo kiosks and paper products. Eastman Kodak emerged out of bankruptcy protection in August 2013 and concentrates its business on commercial printing and packaging services.[9]

Becoming the only super power in a market of popular and professional products was not just based on product quality. Advertising the big brand was always a not underestimatable factor of Kodak's success.

For much of its history, Kodak operated on what has been called the "razor blade" business model. Camera manufacture was not Kodak's primary source of profits; instead, affordable cameras generated an ongoing, steady demand for photographic consumables: film, chemistry, and print paper.

The Kodak Digital Camera System is a series of digital single-lens reflex cameras and digital camera backs that were released by Kodak in the 1990s and 2000s, and discontinued in 2005.[1] They are all based on existing 35mm film SLRs from Nikon, Canon and Sigma. The range includes the original Kodak DCS, the first commercially available digital SLR.

In 1975, Steven Sasson developed Kodak's first prototype digital still camera, which used a Fairchild 100 x 100 pixel CCD.[2][3] By 1986 Kodak had developed a sensor with 1.4 million pixels.[4] It was used in what is believed to be the world's first Digital Single-Lens Reflex (D-SLR) camera, known as the Electro-Optic Camera, which was designed and constructed by Eastman Kodak Company under a U.S. Government contract in 1987 and 1988.[5]

A number of other improvements were made to increase image quality and usability, including improvements in sensor technology, the first raw image format known as DCR (Digital Camera Raw),[6] and host software to process the DCR images. The original Kodak DCS was launched in 1991, and is based on a stock Nikon F3 SLR film camera with a CCD image sensor mounted in the film gate. It uses a 1.3-megapixel Kodak KAF-1300 sensor, and a separate shoulder-mounted processing and storage unit.

The DCS 200 series, introduced in 1992, condenses the storage unit into a module which is mounted onto the base and back of a stock Nikon 8008 SLR film camera. It was the first digital camera to use the Bayer color filter pattern. The module contains a built-in 80 megabyte hard drive and is powered with AA batteries. It was followed by the upgraded DCS 400 series of 1994, which replaces the hard drive with a PCMCIA card slot. The DCS 400 series includes the 1.5-megapixel DCS 420, and the 6-megapixel Kodak DCS 460, which retailed for $28,000 on launch.[7] In common with Kodak's later 6-megapixel models, the DCS 460 used the award-winning APS-H Kodak M6 sensor.[8] A modified version of the DCS 420 was also sold by the Associated Press as the Associated Press NC2000.[9] In parallel with the DCS 400 series Kodak also sold the analogous Kodak EOS DCS range, which was based on the Canon EOS-1N SLR. With the exception of the original DCS 100, these early models do not include LCD preview screens.

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