Why did Kodak shelve the first digital camera?
In December 1975, a Kodak engineer named Steven Sasson finished a camera that needed no film. It weighed about 3.6 kilograms, produced a 100 by 100 pixel black and white image, and took 23 seconds to write that image onto an audio cassette. It worked, and it pointed straight at the end of Kodak's business.
Sasson showed it to management. "That's cute, but don't tell anyone about it," was the reaction he later described to The New York Times. That line has carried the whole Kodak story ever since, which is a little unfair to the people who said it.
They were protecting the most profitable part of the company. Kodak made its money on the consumable, not the hardware: film, chemicals, processing and prints. A camera sale was the entry ticket to decades of repeat purchases. Digital photography deleted every one of those repeat purchases. Kodak did not ignore the technology. It patented Sasson's architecture, kept an electronic imaging research group running through the 1980s and 1990s, and shipped digital cameras. It simply never funded digital at a level that would have damaged film, which is the only level that would have worked.
How big was Kodak at its peak?
The numbers explain the caution. As late as 1976, Kodak held roughly 90 percent of film sales and 85 percent of camera sales in the United States. Global employment peaked at 145,300 in 1988. In 1996, revenue reached nearly 16 billion dollars and the company was worth more than 31 billion dollars.
Rochester, New York was built around it. Kodak was the largest employer in the region, and George Eastman's personal donations funded the University of Rochester, the Eastman School of Music and much of the city's civic infrastructure.
Dominance in a shrinking market is still shrinkage. Digital camera sales passed film camera sales worldwide in 2003. Kodak stopped selling traditional film cameras in North America and Western Europe in 2004. By the time the iPhone shipped in 2007, the standalone digital camera market Kodak had finally committed to was itself about to collapse. Polaroid, which built the same razor-and-blades trap around instant film, hit the same wall and went through bankruptcy twice.
What happened in the 2012 bankruptcy?
Eastman Kodak filed for Chapter 11 protection in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York on January 19, 2012. The petition listed 5.1 billion dollars in assets against 6.75 billion dollars in liabilities.
The patents were supposed to be the rescue. Kodak had told the court that its digital capture portfolio, more than 1,100 patents covering how digital cameras and phone cameras capture and preview images, might fetch 2.2 to 2.6 billion dollars. In December 2012 it went to a consortium of twelve companies assembled by Intellectual Ventures and RPX, among them Apple, Google, Microsoft, Samsung, Adobe and Facebook, for 525 million dollars. The foundational digital imaging patents sold for about a fifth of what Kodak had hoped, partly because a ruling earlier that year had already gutted Kodak's royalty claims against Apple.
The plan of reorganization took effect on September 3, 2013. What came out was a commercial printing and chemicals company with the consumer photography business cut away. The brand survived. The Kodak people remembered did not.
How did Kodak survive the 2025 going-concern warning?
On August 11, 2025, Eastman Kodak filed a quarterly report that frightened its own shareholders. Term loans carrying about 477 million dollars had been accelerated to May 22, 2026, and 99 million dollars of Series B preferred stock had to be redeemed six days after that. The filing stated plainly: "These conditions raise substantial doubt about Kodak's ability to continue as a going concern." Headlines read as though the 145-year-old company was about to switch the lights off.
The answer was sitting in the pension fund. Kodak terminated the Kodak Retirement Income Plan, which was overfunded, and replaced it with a fully funded cash balance plan for employees. By its third-quarter report on November 6, 2025, the company said the conditions behind the going-concern language had been fully resolved. The reversion closed in December 2025: 1.023 billion dollars of excess plan assets, of which about 767 million dollars came back to Kodak, 609 million of that in cash. Roughly 312 million dollars went straight into prepaying the term loans, cutting the balance to 200 million, and Kodak finished with more than 300 million dollars of cash on hand.
Is the company actually making money now?
Yes, on the most recent results. In the second quarter of 2026, Eastman Kodak reported revenue of 311 million dollars against 263 million a year earlier, an increase of 18 percent, and net income of 17 million dollars against a 26 million dollar loss in the same quarter of 2025. Gross profit rose 61 percent to 82 million dollars, pushing the margin from 19 percent to 26 percent. It was the fourth consecutive quarter of year-over-year improvement in revenue, gross profit and operational EBITDA.
Film is doing the heavy lifting. The Advanced Materials and Chemicals division, which covers motion picture and still film alongside the chemicals business, grew 40 percent to 105 million dollars. Full-year 2025 revenue was 1.069 billion dollars, about 26 million above 2024. The company employed roughly 3,500 people at the end of 2025.
The constraint now is capacity, not demand. Coating and finishing photographic emulsion is a specialist trade with a shrinking labor pool, and Kodak cannot hire its way to more film quickly.
Who owns Kodak and the film brand today?
Eastman Kodak Company is independent and publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker KODK. Nobody bought it out of the 2012 bankruptcy and nobody has bought it since. Jim Continenza has run it as executive chairman and chief executive since 2019.
The film brand is split in two, which is why the ownership question gets contradictory answers online. Eastman Kodak manufactures the film in Rochester. Kodak Alaris, a separate company created in 2013 to settle the UK pension obligations left by the bankruptcy, holds the rights to sell, market and distribute Kodak-branded still film. In August 2024 the UK pension fund sold Kodak Alaris to Kingswood Capital Management, a Los Angeles private equity firm.
Kodak has been blunt about staying in the business. "We are committed to manufacturing film as long as there is demand from the filmmakers and photographers worldwide," the company told PetaPixel in 2023. Demand has cooperated, and prices have followed it. A 35mm roll of Kodak Portra 400 cost around 9 dollars in 2016. In 2026 it sells for roughly 17 to 22 dollars depending on the retailer, close to triple.
Where to find a Kodak camera today
Old Kodak hardware is cheap and plentiful because the company made so much of it for so long. LoveToKnow's price guide puts most Brownie box cameras in the 30 to 60 dollar range, with the Art Deco Beau Brownie between about 85 and 650 dollars depending on condition and color. Sellers list them by the thousand on Etsy's vintage Kodak camera listings. Check the bellows against a light for pinholes and fire the shutter at its slowest speed before you pay. If what you actually want is the pictures rather than the camera, the shoebox of prints and negatives in the attic is the better project, and scanning old photos and negatives costs less than most people expect. The same logic Kodak refused to accept is the one Netflix applied when it walked away from mailing DVDs: kill the profitable thing before the market does it for you.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Kodak still in business in 2026?
Yes. Eastman Kodak Company is still operating in 2026 and returned to profit in the second quarter, reporting 311 million dollars of revenue and 17 million dollars of net income. It warned in an August 2025 filing that there was substantial doubt about its ability to continue as a going concern, then cleared that warning by November 2025 after terminating its overfunded pension plan and prepaying debt.
Who owns Kodak now?
No one company owns Kodak. Eastman Kodak Company is independent and publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange as KODK, with Jim Continenza as executive chairman and chief executive since 2019. Kodak Alaris, the separate business that sells and distributes Kodak-branded still film, was bought by Kingswood Capital Management in August 2024.
Did Kodak really invent the digital camera?
Yes. Kodak engineer Steven Sasson built the first self-contained digital camera in December 1975, a 3.6 kilogram prototype that recorded a 100 by 100 pixel black and white image onto cassette tape in 23 seconds. Kodak patented the design and held more than 1,100 digital imaging patents, which it sold during its 2012 bankruptcy for 525 million dollars.