I have just heard some bad news about Kodak – the company behind so many things in photography, like film.

It seems like a part of the twenty first century when some of the big companies are disappearing… Apparently, Eastman Kodak is close to bankruptcy. Kodak used to be one of the biggest “players” in the photography league. I still remember Kodak film and i remember using Kodak photo paper when I worked for a photo lab.

Today, as I found out, Kodak’s shares sell close to $1 and it looses money very quickly (something like $70 million a month). They also have some lawsuits against Apple and RIM (maker of Blackberry). And if you think that not that long ago, Kodak used to be famous all over the world, known everywhere and used by most of the populations (one of the most famous and remembered brands by Kodak was Instamatic camera).

The times of film are long gone, the digital rules the world now and more and more people don’t even use their cameras nowadays, instead they use their mobile phones. So the “king of film” is dying… The last yellow-boxed Kodachrome rolled out the door of a Mexican factory in 2009. It is s shame that a company that was created in 1880 by George Eastman may be gone quite soon… As late as 1976, Kodak commanded 90% of film sales and 85% of camera sales in the U.S., according to a 2005 case study for Harvard Business School.

Kodak is sliding down, loosing money all the time, according to the information on the web, apparently Kodak “hasn’t had a profitable year since 2007”. We just need to believe that Kodak will “make it” and will survive the hard times. Hopefully they will.