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Comment by holidayacct | Hacker News Reader

People ahould really stop treating Kodak like they were just a film company. I knew someone who worked for Kodak as a software engineer right before they started having financial problems. They had a massive patent portfolio of imaging technology and image detection algorithms that is being used by google and microsoft right now. Some of the portfolio was so advanced that there was a bidding war between microsoft and google for the entire portfolio. We couldn't figure out what the bidding war was about until a few of our friends saw what was in the patent portfolio from the 1960s. I can't say what was in the portfolio but if they had to recreate what Kodak built in 1965 it would take half of Google a decade to get close. I'm not even remotely exaggerating. Kodak burned out a lot of people proving out their portfolio.

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Definitely. Kodak did a hell of a lot of research. however let me nit a little about your statement. you make it sound like they had patents from the 60's that others wanted. patents expire after 20 years, anything from the 60's would be public domain at this point.

But yeah all them jucy patents from the 90's were extremely desirable.

Indeed. Kodak basically invented digital intermediate. See:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cineon

They had an end-to-end (scanning, compositing, film out) 4K system back in the early 90s. They were able to crack the colour technology allowing for an image to be accurately represented and recorded back out to film without deterioration. I believe they pioneered using Lasers for this (Kodak Lightning Film Recorder).

I used to work at a facility that had one of the first 16-bit laser recorders. It was very finicky about things like humidity levels and what not. Working for this company I learned that when films are digitally remastered they are often saved back out to film masters; except not color negatives. They instead are separated into RGB* channels with each channel being recorded back to its own B&W negative. When restored from negatives, they have to scan each bit of film to be recombined for a final image. This in itself poses new issues as film behaves differently when stored for long periods of time and can actually shrink. Times 3. So the recombining of the final image can be a bit "tricky".

*I don't know if it was actually RGB or a YUV type of format. I never asked. I was just told separate color channels, and assumed RGB on my own.

Indeed. 35mm is actually a good archiving format if stored correctly; good for 100 years. No need to continually change tape formats every couple of years.

I've heard for some of the 3 strip technicolor restorations, they scan the 3 individual B&W camera negative rolls separately (red, green, blue) and do the technicolor printing process in software effectively. This can give better results if the final technicolor print has issues.

IIRC, Snow White was the first digital corrected film that went through this process. Each frame scanned from negative, stored as digital file, digitally restored*, rescanned into channel separate negatives via laser recorder.

*Restoration has multiple stages like film scratch removal, dust removal, color correction, shape restoration from any warping/shrinking in the film being scanned, etc. Lots of work goes into this that most people never even consider

It didn't help them survive the transition to digital though did it. They were pioneers when it came to digital but when you look back now perhaps it wasn't such a good investment. They couldn't stop what was coming but I can't help feeling they would have been better off realising they were a chemicals business, not an imaging business.

Kodak like they were just a film company.

Kodak basically invented the modern digital camera. They made the first digital still image sensor, had the first commercially available DSLR and pretty much owned the (admittedly very small) Pro DSLR market in the early-mid 90s.

However management was scared that digital would eat into their film profits and pretty much killed their digital business.

The thing is that Kodak was never really a _film_ company. Or a camera company. They were a chemical company.

The lions share of their profit came from producing the chemicals and equipment used to develop the film. The digital switch wouldn't have "eaten into" their profits, it would have required a massive restructuring and refocusing of the company and they would lose most of their employees in the process.

Of course they didn't, and it happened anyway, just a few years later. I'm not saying it was a good decision, but it would have been an incredibly difficult decision to go the other way.

They spun off Eastman Chemical before digital cameras were a threat. They didn't want the liability of more superfund sites than they already have.

Aren't patents public? What prevents you disclosing which patents were included?

> Aren't patents public?

Yes. Patent literally means the opposite of latent (hidden).

Kodak comes up as the assignee name in ~22000 patents in the USPTO (search at [0]), only counting since 1976, so certainly incomplete. Of those, some have been superseded, some are worthless false paths, and some are incredibly valuable. The patents may be public, but nobody is going to give out the other information for free.

[0] https://patft.uspto.gov/netahtml/PTO/search-bool.html

Edit: I forgot that patents are only valid for 20 years, but at any given moment there were still likely to be thousands of valid patents.

The ultimate significance of the patents contained within the portfolio (how they will empower business plans, why they may be quite valuable) will not necessarily be apparent from simply looking at the technology described. And a potential buyer would always want to keep these hidden things (essentially its own business plans) secret.

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