Kodak's Digital Journey

In 1975, Steven Sasson (Sasson), an employee at Kodak, designed a prototype of a digital camera that captured black and white images on a digital cassette tape. Using the camera, which weighed around eight pounds, he shot a picture which took 23 seconds to record on the cassette and about the same time to deliver the output to a television screen. However, the final picture was of poor quality and Sasson received negative feedback from his superiors, who were not happy with the complex set up. The product was not developed for commercialization. In the 1980s, Kodak concentrated on digital technology and started developing Organic Light Emitting Diode (OLED) displays. In the mid-1980s, it invented a number of solid-state image sensors which converted light to digital pictures...

Carp, who had joined Kodak in 1970 as a statistical analyst, became president and chief operating officer of Kodak in 1997. In the year 2000, Kodak's digital business lost US$ 76 million. In early 2000, Kodak turned its attention to manufacturing low-priced and easy-to-use digital cameras. As the number of online photo-sharing websites started increasing, Kodak began to think in terms of entering into alliances with them. It took a minority equity stake in an online photo-processing company Snapfish and supplied photo paper to that company. Kodak also launched a new online photo-finishing service called Print@Kodak. This service provided print facilities to customers and photo-sharing websites such as PhotoPoint.com and Nuwave Technologies...