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Kodak to sell the film business that made it so famous (update)
Kodak is selling off its renowned film arm in order to revive its moribund fortunes. It'll join sales of the company's patent portfolio, online gallery, commercial scanning, photo kiosk and theme park businesses so it can concentrate on a not-yet successful printer enterprise. It needs to raise more than $660 million to pay back creditors before it can emerge from Chapter 11, which it aims to do early next year -- but not in any form that we're likely to recognize. [Image Credit: MercerFilm] Update: The company got in touch to say that while those parts of the business are being put up for sale, manufacturing, sales and marketing of Kodak-branded film products (and motion picture products) will remain within the Eastman-Kodak company.
Prototype device detects, disables digital cameras
Proving once again that "outdated technology" still has its place among today's high-tech products, old-school film cameras may soon be the only shooters not rendered ineffective in the face of a new device that promises to identify and disable their digital counterparts in secure environments. Currently still in the prototype phase, the device developed by researchers at the Georgia Tech College of Computing's Interactive and Intelligent Computing Division uses its own set of digital cameras along with a scanning laser to inspect a given area for telltale signs of CCD imagers (shape, size, reflectivity), and subsequently shoots out concentrated beams of light to overwhelm the sensors of offending gadgets. Although the device is still unable to accurately detect camcorders whose CCDs are set farther back from the lens than regular still cameras, once that obstacle is overcome, this technology is expected to be deployed by governments and businesses as an anti-espionage technique or in movie theaters as a way of combating piracy. See, you thought you were ahead of the game with your ten megapixel cameraphone, but it's actually the spies and pirates equipped with those old medium-format Pentaxes who will soon rise to the top of their respective professions.[Via Dvorak Uncensored]
