1971 Kodak Film pro-vote "Voter's Choice" advert advertising a $4.95 political watch of indeterminate make featuring one of three dial choices - Elephant (Republican), Donkey (Democrat), or...Uncle Sam. "A timely offer from Kodak...I want YOU to have a 'voter's choice' watch"
Dimensions: Approx. 10 inches wide by 13 inches high
The Eastman Kodak Company, referred to simply as Kodak, is an American public company that produces various products related to its historic roots in film photography. The company is headquartered in Rochester, New York, and is best known for photographic film products, which it brought to a mass market for the first time.
Kodak began as a partnership between George Eastman and Henry A. Strong to develop a film roll camera. After the release of the Kodak camera, Eastman Kodak was incorporated in 1892, and under Eastman's direction the company became one of the world's largest film and camera manufacturers, and also developed a model of welfare capitalism and a close relationship with the city of Rochester.
During most of the 20th century, Kodak held a dominant position in photographic film and produced several technological innovations through heavy investment in research and development at Kodak Research Laboratories. Kodak produced some of the most popular camera models of the 20th century, including the Brownie and Instamatic. The company's ubiquity was such that its "Kodak moment" tagline entered the common lexicon to describe a personal event that deserved to be recorded for posterity.
Kodak began to struggle financially in the late 1990s as a result of increasing competition from Japanese company Fujifilm. The company also struggled with the transition from film to digital photography, even though Kodak had invented integral color image sensors and had developed the first self-contained digital camera prototype in the mid-1970s.
Attempts to diversify its chemical operations failed, and as a turnaround strategy in the 2000s, Kodak instead made an aggressive turn to digital photography and digital printing. These strategies failed to improve the company's finances, and in January 2012, Kodak filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.
In September 2013, the company emerged from bankruptcy, having shed its large legacy liabilities, restructured, and exited several businesses. Since emerging from bankruptcy, Kodak has continued to provide commercial digital printing products and services, motion picture film, and still film, the last of which was distributed through the spinoff company Kodak Alaris until 2026.
Following Kodak's emergence from bankruptcy in 2013, filmmaker Christopher Nolan organized a coalition of prominent Hollywood filmmakers, including J. J. Abrams, Judd Apatow, Vince Gilligan, Rian Johnson, Bennett Miller, Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, and Quentin Tarantino, to campaign for the continued use and preservation of motion-picture film by lobbying the six major film studios to maintain their support for the format.
Their lobbying led to a February 2015 agreement under which Kodak secured film-supply deals with 20th Century Fox, Walt Disney Studios, Warner Bros. Entertainment, NBCUniversal, Paramount Pictures, and Sony Pictures, with the studios committing to purchase specified quantities of Kodak film stock over several years for use in theatrical films and television productions. At the end of 2016, Kodak reported its first annual profit since bankruptcy.
In recent years, Kodak has licensed its brand to several other companies. The California-based company JK Imaging has manufactured Micro Four-Thirds cameras under the Kodak brand since 2013. The Kodak Ektra, a smartphone, was designed by the Bullitt Group and launched in 2016. Digital tablets were announced with Archos in 2017. In 2018, Kodak announced two failed cryptocurrency products; the cryptocurrency KodakCoin, which was developed by RYDE Holding, Inc., and the Kodak Kashminer, a Bitcoin-mining computer which was developed by Spotlite.
Despite the pivot to digital technology, film remains a major component of Kodak's business. The company continues to supply film to the motion picture industry after signing new agreements with major studios in 2015 and 2020. In 2022, Kodak announced it would hire new film technicians after film photography experienced a revival among hobbyists.
