They are on hard times now, because of the decline in their consumer sales, but they have heaped honors on themselves for decades by producing rigidly quality-controlled custom film emulsions and color filters for astronomy even though it must have been at a severe financial loss to themselves.

Back in the day before digital imaging, much astronomy was done by comparing old photographic plates with newer ones, so it was more important that the emulsions were identical and stable (and optimized for each application) than that they be as sensitive as possible. It must have been very expensive for them to do this kind of quality control for a product with so little demand and sales, but to their credit, Kodak put out a quality product.

As a student, I worked with Kodak glass plates in stellar positional mapping, and we could be assured that plates exposed decades earlier had identical properties to the ones used today, and the images on each directly comparable. These old plates could not be replaced by newer technologies, they were a historical, nay, archaeological record. When a stellar image measured off one plate was noted to have moved relative to its position on another, or its brightness or color compared to a modern image, we knew any changes were due to the star itself, not the detector. Similar emulsion and bandpass filters were developed by Kodak for color photometry, spectroscopy, and other applications. Astronomers all over the world benefited from these products.

Years later, I worked with Kodak glass plates in photogrammetry, doing highly precise stereo mapping with images I knew were consistent and stable over time. Much of what geographers now know about the earth we can thank Eastman Kodak for.