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Comment by pilom | Hacker News Reader

As a Rochester native and a son and grandson of Kodak employees, this article hits pretty close to home. Unfortunately I'm too young to remember the Kodak my grandfather worked for. My grandmother bought 10 shares of Kodak stock for me when I was born as an investment for my college account. With all of that in mind my optimism may be naive.

In my opinion, if their patents are not enough to save the company, they at least have kept around many of the right employees to move forward in a digital internet enabled society. They are starting to make a platform for turning digital images into physical prints. Every Target and many CVS stores have Kodak printing kiosks which allow you to print straight from facebook and film. They just released a facebook app for making prints and photobooks. They may not have film and they may not have the its popular digital cameras, but they have the best platform for making prints hands down.

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But the amount of photos that get printed are small, very small. Is it enough to save the company, without patents, without cameras?

I only have 1 traditionally printed picture, framed and sitting on my desk. I only have it because it was a gift. (I pulled off the back of it, it was printed on, you guessed it, Fijifilm)

The other pictures I have are done in a less traditional manner. I've had a few done by Fracture, which people have loved (of which, ironically, I personally own none). No film involved.

Can Kodak survive? I think so, but they won't be anything like the Kodak my parents or I grew up with, and only if they get out of the camera (and possibly home printer) markets.

Is that also a matter of marketing? I love printed photos, and have recently starting printing photos books - amazing christmas presents for a start. I grew up looking through our family albums and I want my kids to have the same experience. It may be that there is a renaissance in the printed photo yet to come, and I'd trust Kodak for the technology of that if they could figure out how to fuel a boom.

You bring up a very good point, one that I didn't even consider. I, also, would want my children to have similar experiences as me, it terrifies me slightly to think of how different things could/will be.

I still think that puts Kodak outside the realm of cameras and printers, but could possibly reinvent themselves to that market.

Last December my mother purchased a Kodak slide projector for my grandfather. We set it up and projected some of the 17 carousels, and clicked through them, as he and my mother would tell stories relating to them. It was a wholesome family experience, and we would probably not all crowd around a computer screen to do something similar in iPhoto.

[Note to Kodak: Ignore my earlier statement about getting out of the camera/printer market and do a couple production runs of slide projectors… we've now gone through two of them because they're just so old!]

My local supermarkets used to have those Kodak kiosks in the place they used to have 1-hour developing (a decade ago). Last year, they tore out the kiosks to replace them with DVDs and magazine racks.

My local camera store tried to manage the transition to digital, but couldn't hold on. They finally went out of business a year ago, and the building torn down. In its place is a new bank.

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