Kodak to exit digital cameras; focus on printers

The Eastman Kodak Company said yesterday that it would stop making digital cameras, pocket video cameras and digital picture frames, marking the end of an era for the company that brought photography to the masses over a century ago.

The company, founded by George Eastman in 1880, came to be known all over the world for its Brownie and Instamatic cameras and its yellow-and-red film boxes. However, it suffered heavily when competition from the Japanese got keener 1980s, and was not able make the switch to digital technology.

According to the company, which went in for bankruptcy protection last month, it would phase out the product lines in the first half of this year and would look to other companies to license its brand for those products.

It was a particularly poignant moment for the Rochester-based company. In 1975, using a type of electronic sensor invented six years earlier at Bell Labs, a Kodak engineer named Steven Sasson invented the first digital camera, which was a toaster-size prototype capturing black-and-white images at 0.1 megapixels resolution.

Through the 1990s, Kodak spent around $4 billion on the development of the photo technology inside most of today's cellphones and digital devices, however its failure to switch from film allowed rivals like Canon and the Sony Corporation to rush into the fast-emerging digital arena. The immensely lucrative analog business Kodak worried about undermining for a decade was virtually erased by the filmless photography it had invented.

The stand-alone digital camera today has a tough competitor in smartphone cameras that are gaining broader use. Kodak has patents that cover basic functions in many smartphone cameras. It picked up $27 million in patent-licensing fees in the first half of 2011 and around $1.9 billion from those fees in the prior three years combined.