How old is kodak company

Laying the Foundation In , George Eastman, a young hobbyist photographer and school dropout, became one of the first to successfully manufacture dry plates commercially in the United States. Learn More. Motion Pictures When George Eastman marketed the first commercial transparent roll film in , it enabled Thomas Edison to develop the first motion picture camera.

Printing and Publishing Kodak first sold materials designed for the printing industry in Milestones The Kodak name is recognized around the world for its long heritage of delivering imaging innovations. This made cameras cheap enough for the public to start getting them and the ease of development saw many flock to it in droves. It allowed the general public to consider owning a camera and taking photos. This, in turn, snowballed into more sales and revenue for Kodak and was a win-win for all.

Not before long, Kodak started including the charges of developing and printing film rolls into their pricing. This further increased the profits and also locked the customer into the Kodak ecosystem since they had to only go to Kodak to get their rolls developed.

Kodak did not halt and rest on their early successes and kept on innovating. It was only in , 74 years after it was first introduced, that Kodak stopped manufacturing the Kodachrome film rolls. The first digital camera to be invented was by Kodak. The following year, Kodak researcher Bryce Bayer invented the Bayer colour filter array — a grid of Red, Green and Blue RGB colour filters that allowed the image sensor to light intensity brightness along with light wavelengths colour.

The Bayer filter is considered to be a very important invention since it helps cameras take colour photos and is still used in nearly all modern digital sensors. The same year, Kodak had become the biggest player in the photography as well as the film industry. The industry was starting to shift more towards the digital counterparts and less towards film rolls and the analogue cameras.

Kodak even used the OLED displays as viewfinder displays on their digital cameras. Kodak, over the entirety of its operations, made most of its money from film rolls and felt that it needed to continue and preserve the sales of its film rolls.

So even when digital cameras — that Kodak helped invent — gained popularity, Kodak was still focussing on promoting its analogue products such as film rolls. Together, these inventions formed the basis of the first mass-market produced rolls of film. Along with the famed Thomas Edison, Eastman trimmed 40mm filmstock down to 35mm. The Kinetoscope was an instrumental device in the development of the film industry.

To accompany the trademarked name, Eastman developed and released a Kodak camera which was loaded with paper film of photos. And so was born the amateur photograph. By , Kodak had patented a pocketable camera. In , the company released Kodachrome which was instantly a mass-market success. Sadly in the Kodachrome was discontinued, much to the dismay of the photographic community.