Summer is a great time to spend in the basement on a rainy day, rummaging through all of the things you "know" you need, but don't quite know what to do with.  Despite your best intentions to try to clean up, you know you're still going to hold on to a lot of the things you find, like your high school yearbook, or the clay - something - you got from your kindergartener one year for Father's Day.  For others, you're not quite sure how they got there in the first place.  (Look at that - I did pretty well on my second-grade spelling test.)  But every so often, you come across something that really offers an interesting perspective on the past.

A little while ago, we were going though Kodak's "basement" and found an old trade-show display for our Image Sensor business.  We haven't used this display in about 10 years - when we moved to our new design, we must have put the old one in storage "in case we needed it." 



It's always fun to see how things have changed over time.  Ten years ago, our image sensor portfolio had 21 sensors, while today we have almost twice that number.  "High-resolution" was 16-megapixels (now we're at over 50 for professional photography), and we were proudly working with Kodak's newest "Digital Science" branding.  And while the display was certainly well constructed, it was anything but lightweight (just ask the group of people we needed to help move it out of storage). 



But as you look through the products in the display, you suddenly realize something else.  Of the 21 image sensors shown in the display, two of them - known today as the KAI-0330 and KAI-1010 - are still available for sale (the part numbers have changed slightly, but they are actually the same products).  Another eleven are the direct ancestors of devices we sell today - they have the same pixel size and resolution count, but have incorporated design and process manufacturing changes to improve their performance.  That's over half of the sensors in this ten year old display - all of which can be traced directly to products offered in our CCD portfolio today. 

To really appreciate this, take a minute to think about what was going on ten years ago.  Apple Computer had just released the first iBook and the Power Macintosh G4.  Microsoft was releasing its latest operating system:  Windows 98 Second Edition.  And no one was quite sure just how bad the Millennium bug would really be.  While all of these have come and gone, these image sensors designed by Kodak over 10 years ago are still going strong.



That's not to say that we've been sitting still.  Two-thirds of our current CCD portfolio consists of products launched after this display was retired - new products for photographic, medical, scientific, and industrial imaging.  And we continue to bring out new products based on the latest image sensor technology, like our family of image sensors based on the KODAK TRUESENSE 5.5 micron Interline Transfer CCD Platform.

Memories can be fun, especially on a rainy day (like so may we've had this summer in Rochester).  But what really makes this old trade-show display so special is the planning it represents - not in the visual design of the display, but in the architectural design of the image sensors that are in it.  Designs done over a decade ago that are still current today. 

In the end, this display is about more then just memories.  I think we'll hold on to it just a little while longer.

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