It’s sad to hear Kodak filing for bankruptcy. And I’m sure a lot of people give a little sigh of regret with a tinge of nostalgia at hearing the news. Though in a way, it’s well overdue. I mean, who uses cameras with films these days? Actually, my last Kodak camera was well over a decade ago. It was one of the first digital cameras in the market and with 3 megapixels to boot. And you could do cool stuff like photo-sharing and print the photos up yourself. But then it didn’t last very long before other slimmer, fancier looking digital cameras with bigger megapixels flooded the market and suddenly my Kodak camera seemed rather old-fashioned. From then on, with the emergence of everything digital and with built-in cameras and photo-sharing capability, like the mobile phones, well, we really haven’t heard anything from Kodak in the last ten years.
But still, the name is synonymous with camera, having been around for 131 years and was the first to introduce an apparatus that even a child could use, making photography a simple recreation that anyone could indulge in. As a matter of fact, I have an aunt who still refers to a camera as a ‘Kodak’, which goes to show how ubiquitous the brand was in the global household. And of course, we still talk about a ‘Kodak moment’ when talking about an event that is particularly memorable, because for a long time, the easiest way to record that event and put it to memory is with a Kodak film or a Kodak Instamatic camera.↧