Kodak to kill off digital cameras

Throwing losers overboard

Kodak never made a profitable dime in the digital consumer electronics area. Nothing. Its only digital profit came from the professional products, like packaging. Kodak sold its profitable professional image sensor fabrication plant last year for cash.

As for licensing, brands don't mean anything. The "Carl Zeiss" optics in a Nokia are designed by Carl Zeiss Optics. Kodak never developed a consumer brand for lenses, just bottom-grade consumer cameras and fabulous film. How many Kodak brand sensors are in cameras? Plenty, but would you ever know it? The Pentax 645D 40Mp camera has a Kodak sensor, but you'd never know it from looking at the box.

Shuttered?

A Shame.

I still use a Kodak point and shoot digital camera. It has an optical viewfinder that works better than a screen in bright sunlight, and came with twice the internal memory of the competing brands' offerings in the same price range. Tough too. The only way I know they can be killed is by running them over with a car.

Kodak pioneered color photography, and invented a dye-based grainless slide film that made images that can be enlarged up to the limits of the enlarger without noticeable loss of resolution possible.

The end of an era indeed.

Lovely, now my Mother in law will never move to Digital

I am sure my mother in law is going to use this as a reason that digital cameras are evil, and should not be used.

We gave her two good, easy to use digital cameras, and she still insists to using 35mm, and no, she does not store the negatives safely, if the house burns down, the photos, negatives, etc are gone. She feels more comfortable with them being securely stored sitting below the TV in the living room then on three backup servers across town, across the country, and around the world...

Posting as an AC in case any of that part of the family happen around these parts.

The last Kodak camera I tried (in 2007), a 10MP, £300 model; gave worse photos than my first ever digital camera, a FujiFilm 1.3MP fixed focus camera from about 12 years ago.

After one summer holidays worth of appalling photos, I gave it to the children at my kindergarten and bought a Nikon.

Kodak has been dead for years, but like any colossus, it takes a while for the corpse to stop twitching.

A sad day!

Kodak had made some great cameras, their dslr offerings (dcs14) were excellent and their sensors still are awesome for medium format (albeit spun/sold) off these days. I've never used much of their film, besides some porta as I tend to favor fuji but its highly regarded).

Its a shame they didn't downsize the company a long time ago, drop what they couldn't compete in (all those consumer cameras, photoframes etc) and concentrate on film and sensors and licencing / developing IP. I hope they pull through!

Shame this, the Zi8 camera is a belter - captures lovely outdoor colours and gives a clear, crisp picture and one of the few (if not the only) that has a slot for an external mic. As someone else said, time to try and snap a few up.

"Kodak's camera line had a low-end focus - a market now being consumed by smartphone sellers - and few models won particular praise for the firm."

Actually in the early days of digital Kodak made some pretty good stuff. Back before you heard the word megapixel bandied about (because compacts didn't generally boast that many) Kodak's compacts were well regarded. They also sold some pretty impressive full frame DSLRs, actually based on Nikon and Canon SLR bodies, that were well ahead of the stuff Nikon and Canon were making themselves. Indeed I know of at least one award winning pro who still uses Kodak branded DSLRs even though they've been off the market for six years.

In short Kodak started really well in the digitial camera market, but went right down the tubes due mainly to poor management decisions.