Kodak gets digital picture - News - Business

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This story was printed from ZDNet Australia.
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Kodak gets digital picture

By Richard Shim, ZDNet News
November 16, 2000
URL: http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/business/soa/Kodak-gets-digital-picture/0,139023166,120106997,00.htm

Putting on a show worthy of its setting, Eastman Kodak Co. CEO and President Dan Carp used Comdex/Fall '00 to position his company as a leader in digital photography.

Amid a string of skits that included a pair of Siegfried and Roy impersonators, an unconvincing mime, and a Las Vegas minister, and was capped off by a group of about 100 kids singing "True Colors," Carp laid out a number of Kodak's (NYSE: EK) digital imaging products.

The message was that the print photography leader is changing its tune to incorporate the quickly growing digital imaging market.

According to market researcher IDC , digital camera shipments worldwide are projected to grow 72 percent to 44 million units from 2000 to 2004.

And where there are cameras there are images, so Kodak is positioning itself to be a leader in that market as it is in print photos.

After his speech Tuesday evening, Carp told ZDNet News that the company invests US$900 million in research and development with 75 percent of that invested in digital imaging solutions.

Citing the use of digital images on online shopping sites, Carp exclaimed, "Pictures are the next killer app ... pictures will play a bigger part in the new millennium."

"The Internet is one of the most voracious users of pictures..." he said.

Among Carp's demonstrations were:

a camera with RF, or radio frequency, technology that can download images to a user's PC whenever it is in proximity;
an image taken by the first 16-megapixel CCD camera, which will be available for commercial users next year -- most consumer digital cameras available today offer a fifth or less of that resolution;
a technology that help users organize their photos by recognizing certain features of the images, such as faces, and ordering them accordingly;
interactive 3-D images, 120-bit tamper resistant watermarking, and interactive imaging content, which adds audio and video clips to pictures in online photo albums;
an Advantix film camera that allows users to view pictures on a digital display immediately after they have been taken; and
an OLED, or organic light electric diode display, which is about the thickness of a nickel but is brighter than today's LCDs, and uses only a fraction of the battery life. This is Kodak's newest business, and Carp estimated it will be a US$1 billion to US$5 billion business in five years.