In 1975, Kodak engineer Steve Sasson built the first digital camera. It took 23 seconds to write one tiny 0.01 megapixel photo to a cassette tape, and his bosses told him not to tell anyone. Kodak held about 90 percent of US film sales in 1976, peaked at about 145,000 workers in 1988, reached nearly $16 billion in sales in 1996 and was worth about $31 billion in the late 1990s. Here is how film profits, internal forecasts that digital would win, a late push into home printers and EasyShare cameras, and the smartphone led to the Chapter 11 filing on January 19, 2012, with about $5.1 billion in assets against $6.75 billion in debts, and a patent sale that brought about $525 million instead of the hoped for $2.2 billion. Fujifilm faced the same cliff, listed what film had taught it, and moved into skin care, medicines, medical imaging and display films. Today Fujifilm sells more than $21 billion a year with about 73,500 employees, while Kodak sells about $1 billion with about 3,900.
Sources: The New York Times (May 2, 2008) and New York Times Lens (August 12, 2015), IEEE Spectrum (June 30, 2020), Reuters (January 20, 2012), The Economist (January 14, 2012), Kodak Chapter 11 filing (January 19, 2012), Kodak patent sale reporting (December 2012), Kodak 10-K (2024), Fujifilm group overview (March 31, 2026), Kodak company history, Fujifilm integrated reporting.
Photo credits: Steve Sasson: Aljawad, CC BY 3.0. Shigetaka Komori 2015: StagiaireMGIMO, CC BY 3.0. Kodak Tower, Rochester: Pedro Terres, CC BY 4.0. Fujifilm headquarters, Tokyo: Akonnchiroll, CC BY-SA 4.0. Instax Mini 55: Ubahnverleih, CC0. Kodak and Fujifilm logos: public domain. All via Wikimedia Commons.
Some scenes are illustrative AI generated visuals. No generated faces of named people.
