Kodak: Digital Photography and Electronic Image Sensor Essay

Submitted By bigbirdelmo
Words: 330
Pages: 2

What is Kodak’s current position in digital imaging? Would Kodak’s position be different had the company adopted a different digital imaging strategy in the eighties and the nineties? Evaluate Kodak’s strategy starting in the mid-eighties.

Research lab- was very important. Didn’t work because of the lab’s financial structure. -P.5 pf.3-
The beginning was good.- p.5 pf.5- first electronic image sensor in 1986, 50 products by 1989… Seemed to have realized the importance of electronics.
Photo CD- was very expensive. Both the machine and the discs. Very different from the previous strategy of making cheaper cameras, and basing mostly on film. Customers did not have other choices with the CD player, and had to pay a lot of money. No data about film roll prices, but I assume it was much lower than $20. Another mistake with that was a wrong market targeting (as mentioned in p.6 pf.4).
Kodak insisted on maintaining the chemical-photography R&D although it was a dying industry. (p.7) in my opinion, they probably should have separated activities. Maintaining R&D in chemicals just for lowering film production costs (and not quality improvement), and try to “milk” cash from the emerging markets, that may prefer to consume the older, cheaper technology.

** It’s not clear to me what their strategy was regarding digital imaging**
At first, they were very busy trying to combine the chemical and digital technologies.
Then, although developing a digital camera (not