Bryan Jones comes back on what Kodak represented to the sad realisation of what it has become.
The sad part of this is that Kodak is another example of the a company that fell from dramatic heights and has gone from a name that everybody knew to one that does not have nearly the brand recognition it once had that was all things photography.
To me, Kodak rings now with good film (a very niche product today) and crappy digital camera. That last part is no longer since Kodak announced they abandon the camera business in light of their bankruptcy reorganisation. They contributed a lot to photography, with innovations like the roll film, Kodachrome that made color photography easier, the first digital camera in 1975, etc. The also contributed to make photography accessible to anybody, for the best or the worse. We, photographers, have a huge debt towards Kodak.
Incidentally I came back to photography a bit because I bought a Kodak digital camera in 1999 – which was at the time decent. Then I bought a Canon EOS film camera and ended up mostly shooting Fuji slide film… Today my TLR film camera sees a lot of Kodak film.