Luminous Landscape Forum
Equipment & Techniques => Medium Format / Film / Digital Backs – and Large Sensor Photography => Topic started by: BJL on April 20, 2014, 10:34:03 am
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Kodaks sensor division Truesense was sold to a short-term owner Platinum Equity (1) but it has now found a more appropriate long-term owner, ON Semi:
http://image-sensors-world.blogspot.se/2014/04/on-semi-to-acquire-truesense-imaging.html
I also learnt that the CMOS sensors in the Truesense catalog are outsourced in both design and manufacture, so Truesense itself still has only CCD assets. ON's sensors are instead all active pixel CMOS, so I suppose Truesense is a complementary asset for them.
Nothing in this press release indicates any interest in developing new sensors for medium format cameras, so I am posting here in case people are asking "whatever happened to ..."
(1) AFAIK Platinum Equity is like a corporate pawnbroker: buying the assets of financially distressed firms that are under pressure to sell very fast, and so paying bargain prices, with the goal of reselling soon for a quick profit.
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Who is the current owner of the Bayer patent? Are some of the fundamental Kodak patents still valid?
Edmund
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Who is the current owner of the Bayer patent? Are some of the fundamental Kodak patents still valid?
Edmund
That one is from 1976, and so is long past its twenty-year expiry date -- http://www.google.com/patents/US3971065
Kodak sold its digital imaging patents in a bundle to a group of of buyers apparently lead by Intellectual Ventures (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_Ventures), so I do not think that Truesense has any of them -- http://www.kodak.com/ek/US/en/Kodak_Completes_527_Million_Transaction_Related_to_Digital_Imaging_Patents.htm
P. S. Truesense sold for only about one sixth as much as those patents did: US$92 million for Truesense vs US$527 million for the patents. For comparison, the other MF CCD maker, Dalsa, went for US$335 million when Teledyne bought it.