Kodak Company and Market Segment

Kodak Company, founded by George Eastman, is a worldwide US corporation that produces imaging and photographic equipment such as digital cameras, imaging systems and sensors and photographic film. Eastman decided the name of the company should be short, unique and easy to pronounce. Originally the name was “Nodak” chosen by David Houston, a fellow photographic inventor who later sold several patents to roll film camera concepts to Eastman. Houston chose “Nodak” as a nickname of his home state North Dakota. ‘K’ has always been Eastman’s favorite letter. Therefore "Kodak" was trademarked prior to Eastman buying Houston’s patents. Kodak had a simple eye catching logo, showing a red outline of the letter ‘K’ in a yellow background, with ‘Kodak’ written in yellow. In 2006 the logo changed to ‘Kodak’ written in bold red. Kodak has been long known for its wide range of photographic film products, and now its two major markets are digital photography and digital printing. Kodak is also known for being the leading producer of silver halide paper used for printing from film and digital images. Kodak also manufactures photo kiosks, which is something that prints in minutes from digital sources. There is about 80,000 Picture Kiosks in retail locations worldwide. Kodak also markets Picture CDs and other photo related products such as calendars, photo books, photo albums and photo enlargements through retail partners like CVS and Walmart, through its Kodak Gallery online service formerly known as Ofoto. Kodak announced they would end their production of black and white photo paper in 2005. The Kodak DCS DSLR camera series had triggered Kodak’s fame, it included the first commercial DSLR Kodak DCS 100 which was Nikon based. Chinon Industries, a Japanese camera manufacturer, designed and built many of Kodak’s earlier compact digital cameras. In 2004 Chinon joined Kodak Japan with many of its engineers and designers. In 2006 Kodak announced that Flextronics would manufacture and