The pension plan will be able to use the Kodak name for things like film and film cameras, and Kodak will provide the supplies and services needed to operate the consumer film business.
Smartphone competitors Apple and Google may be teaming up to gain control of a trove of imaging patents from former film heavyweight Kodak.
The publicity helped Fujifilm's far cheaper film invade Kodak's home market.
One company that offers a limited version of sharing in the field today is Kodak, the old film stalwart that is often derided even though it has managed the digital transition about as well as could be imagined.
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In their bid to simplify loading 35mm film, Kodak, Fuji and other photographic firms squared off the 35mm roll's lead-in tab so a modern SLR's motor-driven loading mechanism could grab the film's sprocket holes and wind it automatically onto the take-up spool.
Last year, Kodak says, it overtook Fuji to become the market leader in China for film and film products. (Fuji claims it still has a lead of a few percentage points for film itself.) Kodak now has 3, 700 stores to Fuji's 2, 000.
Long entangled in its traditional film line, Kodak at last is making a big bet on digital.
Kodak failed to aggressively convert film camera customers to its own digital cameras, and it filed bankruptcy in 2012.
Kodak held on to its film-based cameras for too long and other nimble competitors started to grab market share, of course.
Camera and film company Eastman Kodak also reported sharply lower profits and outlined a restructuring which will see about 3, 500 jobs cut.
George Eastman, the man who invented roll film and founded Eastman Kodak suffered mightily when forced to retire.
Even in the film business, which Kodak comfortably owned for nearly a century, the losses were mounting.
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Not only could digital equipment continuously become obsolete but so could the format that movies are stored in, according to both digital and film experts at Eastman Kodak.
Despite its cash flow and company strengths, Kodak never succeeded beyond its original camera film business .
Kodak never believed in its heart that film would go away so soon.
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Unfortunately, as the digital camera and film world took hold, Kodak doubled down on its non-digital formats, while only dabbling in the digital space.
Eastman Kodak, once a pioneer in traditional film cameras, ended up in bankruptcy after more than a century in business, while Corning keeps on going churning blockbuster products like the fiber optic cable and flat glass.
As excited customers were celebrating the arrival of fantastic digital images and digital cameras, Kodak management stayed the course with its traditional film and camera lines.
Fuji survived the transition from film to digital photography, even though Kodak went bankrupt.
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Kodak would restructure, he said, letting its film business wither while re-investing the cashflow in new digital technologies.
Think about it: Kodak, traditionally a company that sold blades (film), proved that it can also make one fine razor (a camera).
This is reassuringly similar to the current film-based way of doing things, and appeals particularly to companies, such as Kodak, that already have a vast retail network in place and are trying to shore up sales of film and paper.
Finally, until too late, the digital imaging parts of Kodak were kept under the same business roof as the film parts.
Kodak however, was still focused on marketing its single use film camera which continued to sell well.
The one silver lining is that Kodak will continue producing color and black-and-white film, news that should make traditional photographers happy.
Kodak invented home photography , leading it to tremendous wealth as amature film sales soared for seveal decades.
By 1993 proud Kodak was playing catch-up to Japan's Fuji Photo Film Co.
Kodak sold cheap cameras and relied on customers buying lots of expensive film. (Just as Gillette makes money on the blades, not the razors.) That model obviously does not work with digital cameras.
Kodak thought that the thousands of chemicals its researchers had created for use in film might instead be turned into drugs.
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