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How & Why Kodak Entered Into Printer Ink Cartridge Business

Basing on Kodak’s history of diversifying into industries related to manufacturing its camera production requirements, e.g., plastics for film, film supply for medical institutions, etc., it does not come as a surprise then if Kodak ventures into printers and ink cartridge business. Kodak, successfully riding into the digital age, and being one of the stronger contenders in digital photography, is completing the entire digital imaging package: it entered into producing high quality printers to support its superior line of digital cameras.

Kodak has a historical legacy of putting more cameras into the hands of the ordinary people since its inception in the 1870’s by producing cheaper, easier to operate cameras, and their equally cheaper and easier to develop films. This is just like history repeating itself. Kodak, several generations later, is putting cameras into the hands of ordinary people with its high quality but lesser-priced digital cameras. It is now placing out into the market, easier way to print photos with its line of high quality printers: Kodak photo printers with camera docks, and cheaper ink cartridge replacements.

Ink Cartridges Priced 50% Lower than Prevailing Brands

By entering into a joint venture with Lexmark, Kodak joined into the fray of the lucrative business of inkjet photo printers in 1999. It introduced Kodak Personal Picture Maker, a virtual darkroom equivalent of the traditional cameras with a 1200 x 1200 dpi resolution, connected via a parallel-port and CompactFlash and SmartMedia compatible high quality printers that are usable even without using a computer.

Seven years later, Kodak announces the introduction of a new product line of high quality printers that are touted to be revolutionary in the sense that these printers will give 50% cost savings to the printing public. These new models of All-In-One (AiO) high quality printers, thanks to Kodacolor Technology, produce lab quality prints while making a considerable savings for consumers in terms of ink cartridge replacements. Commonly known as Kodak Easyshare printers, these AiO models print out bright and crisp high resolution photos by using high quality pigment-based ink. Photos printed from these are known to last a lifetime. Furthermore, the replacement ink cartridge for these types of printers is way much cheaper because the print head are not manufactured with the ink cartridge. The ink cartridge just serves as an ink tank.

Kodak Targets the Sweet Spot of the Market: Photo Printers at Home

These high quality printers are directed towards everyday consumers as these printers, specifically the ink cartridges, are designed to cut down on ink replacement costs. This is exactly the opposite of what PC printer giants like Hewlett-Packard, Canon, and Epson have been doing. These competitors have been selling printers at a lower cost as they intend to make money consistently on ink cartridge replacements.

Kodak claims that these AiO high quality printers, in terms of cost, can print twice the number of photos or documents compared to using the competitors’ printers and ink cartridges. This is made possible by designing the printers with built-in print head, so consumers will only buy ink in its tank without the print head that makes them very expensive. Kodak adds that you need not throw away those print heads every time users buy a new ink cartridge. Kodak also sells Kodak Value Pack that is claimed to reduce the printing cost of a 4 x 6 inch photo.

About the Author

James Kara Murat, the contributor of PrintCountry Printer Ink Related Articles. A longer version of this article is located at How & Why Kodak Entered Into Printer Ink Cartridge Business, and related resources can be found at Kodak Ink Cartridges.

Darkroom $19.95 Darkroom: A Memoir in Black and White is an arresting and moving personal story about childhood, race, and identity in the American South, rendered in stunning illustrations by the author, Lila Quintero Weaver.   In 1961, when Lila was five, she and her family emigrated from Buenos Aires, Argentina, to Marion, Alabama, in the heart of Alabama’s Black Belt. As educated, middle-class Latino immigrants in a region that was defined by segregation, the Quinteros occupied a privileged vantage from which to view the racially charged culture they inhabited. Weaver and her family were firsthand witnesses to key moments in the civil rights movement.  But Darkroom is her personal story as well: chronicling what it was like being a Latina girl in the Jim Crow South, struggling to understand both a foreign country and the horrors of our nation’s race relations. Weaver, who was neither black nor white, observed very early on the inequalities in the American culture, with its blonde and blue-eyed feminine ideal. Throughout her life, Lila has struggled to find her place in this society and fought against the discrimination around her.

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Darkroom (Paperback) $33.51 In the aftermath of her mother`s suicide, one young woman recognizes the malleability of her reality. From her adolescence in the flat, hot Floridian landscape to a tectonic Missouri adulthood, a girl shaped by grief is compelled to create and manipulate her image of the world. As her dreams become indistinguishable from daily life, she begins to question memory, identity, and the function of love. Employing photography as its central metaphor, Darkroom tackles the tangled relationship between memory and mourning by exploring an artist`s impossible attempt to re-create the object of loss.

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The New Darkroom Handbook $52.95 The Darkroom Handbook, Second Edition, is a completely revised and updated version of a classic guide to the best design, construction, and equipment to use when setting up a darkroom. This book features ideas and money-saving tips on how to put a darkroom almost anywhere in your home or apartment. It takes you inside darkrooms of photographers around the world including those of famous photographers such as, Harry Callahan, Aaron Siskind, Berenice Abbott, and W. Eugene Smith. In addition, it contains detailed do-it-yourself plans for the most essential darkroom components, cutouts and design grids to plan that "dream" darkroom, and special sections on the color darkroom and the digital darkroom. The most comprehensive book on the darkroom. A step-by-step guide to help anyone plan and build a photo lab. Illustrated with an abundance of photos and sketches.

The Darkroom of Damocles $15.43 A modern day masterpiece and the most critically acclaimed Dutch novel of the 20th centuryafinally available in English and shortlisted by Three Percent as one of the best translated books of 2008 During the German occupation of Holland, tobacconist Henri Osewoudt is visited by a man named Dorbeck, who strangely proves to be Osewoudtas spitting image in reverse. Dorbeck assigns Osewoudt to commit a series of dangerous assignments, but things quickly go awry, with Osewouldt eventually killing his own wife. After the war, Osewoudt is taken for a traitor and captured. Osewoudt cannot prove that he received assignments from Dorbeckahe cannot even prove that his doppelganger ever existed. As it forces readers to confront questions of morality and power, right and wrong, "The Darkroom of Damocles" builds to a stunning conclusion.

Darkroom (DVD) $36.49 A married couple that develops crime scene photos for the Salt Lake Police Department gradually finds the psychic toll of their job becoming too much to bear as the disturbing content of the pictures begins to weigh heavily on their morale and cast a suffocating blanket of melancholy over their very existence. Every day, David and Coy are reminded just how badly life can end. When David suffers a devastating disconnect from reality and Coy experiences serious complications while attempting to get pregnant, both of their lives begin spiraling down the same dark and dangerous path.

Darkroom (Hardcover) $128.93 Description not available.

Darkroom Cookbook $35.66 No Synopsis Available