Kodak was the unexpected camera comeback king in 2025!

Once a byword for companies that failed to keep up with the times, ‘Kodak’ used to be uttered in the same breath as ‘Blockbuster’. But not any more. The comeback king has been revitalizing its fortunes largely by betting big on its ultra-cheap PixPro line of compact cameras – you know, the kind of camera we were all assured was dying out. The company that first made its name with point-and-shoot cameras a century ago is doing so once again.

In 2025, PixPro was king. These little compacts, many of which can be picked up for two-figure prices, topped the charts again and again, with Kodak’s compact camera market share leaving the likes of Fujifilm, Canon and Ricoh in the dust, particularly in Japan. And with new film stocks being distributed by Eastman Kodak, and playful novelty cameras blowing up on Instagram, it’s fair to say that Kodak has had its share of successes.

Of course, the licensing of the Kodak name does mean that we’re taking quite a broad brush when we talk about what ‘Kodak’ has done this year, since many of these cameras are made by licensees like JK Imaging and Reto Project. But ultimately, it’s Kodak on all the boxes and Kodak on the bottom line – so let’s take a look back at Kodak in 2025…

January: The film factory reopens

At the outset of the year, Kodak announced the reopening of its film factory, which had previously shut down for a series of upgrades to meet rising demand. That’s right: rising demand. Kodak revealed that in the previous five years, consumers’ appetite for film had doubled, with increased interest in particular from millennial and Gen X cohorts, as well as an uptick in film use on Hollywood productions.

July: The next big seller

With the ultra-cheap PixPro FZ55 and FZ45 compacts having done massive business in 2024, Kodak would have been crazy not to consolidate and release more of them. Happily, they were not crazy, and July saw the arrival of the budget-friendly PixPro C1. Tilted towards content creators, with a flip-up screen and Full HD video, the PixPro C1 also sported some rather fetching retro styling, with faux-leather trim in a choice of black, brown or cream.

The PixPro C1 scored well in our review, with Kalum Carter enjoying the lo-fi aesthetic and finding the results tough to argue with given the camera’s ultra-friendly price. On the C1’s release, our own Chris George wondered if it might be Kodak’s next best-selling compact, and data released later in the year proved him right, with sales of the C1 absolutely crushing the competition.

And Kodak wasn’t quite done, using the final days of July to tease another PixPro release – the PixPro AZ653, a new entry in the monster-zoom bridge camera series. The camera was promised to officially launch at IFA in September and then be on sale later in the year… though we still haven’t had our hands on it yet.

August: A bit of a wobble

With all these big-selling cameras, you’d think the days of Kodak financial troubles hitting the headlines would be over, right? Sadly not – some absolutely eye-watering debt obligations in Eastman Kodak’s quarterly filings caused enough of a flutter in the markets that the firm felt the need to release a statement that assuring everyone that it WASN’T about to go out of business, which is the kind of statement that can often have an opposite effect to the one intended.

Still, business went on, and Kodak also announced a new instant camera inspired by its analog legacy – the Kodak MemoShot Era MS100. With a cylindrical design reminiscent of Kodak’s yellow 35mm film canisters, the Era MS100 was capable of spitting out instant prints on adhesive labels, ready for sticking in a scrapbook or journal.

September: The Kodak Charmera charms Instagram

One can’t always predict which cameras will go mega-viral and which won’t. But with its tiny dimensions, its lo-fi imagery and its nostalgia-baiting packaging, the Kodak Charmera was probably always going to be a big hit with the Instagram crowd.

A tiny boxlike keychain camera based on the old Kodak Fling, the Charmera was capable of capturing just 1.6MP photos, with a selection of vintage filters and frames to lean into the aesthetic. The first round sold out within minutes, and still today it can be tricky to get hold of one.

As Chris said in our Kodak Charmera review, it’s a charmer by name and nature. The sub-$30 price tag makes it very difficult to argue with the image quality on offer, and while the ‘blind box’ gimmick (where you don’t know which design variant you get until you open it up) can be a little irritating if there’s a particular look you like, it does add a frisson of excitement to the purchase.

October: New Kodak color film! Sort of…

New color film stocks are a rare and exciting thing these days, so the unveiling of Kodak Kodacolor 100 and 200 was always going to attract a lot of attention. However, this announcement had even greater significance, as it marked the first time that Eastman Kodak would be distributing its own film in more than a decade.

Since Kodak’s bankruptcy proceedings in 2013, the firm’s color film distribution had been exclusively handled by an entirely separate entity, Kodak Alaris. This meant that Kodak was unable to control things like the pricing of its films. While the announcement was a little vague on specifics, the implication seemed to be that Eastman Kodak had managed to claw back at least some of its distribution rights for film.

It should be noted that these weren’t entirely new color films per se. In its press release, Kodak described them as ‘sub-brands’ of existing films, meaning they were likely very slightly tweaked versions of existing Kodak film stocks – likely Kodak ColorPlus 200, and either Kodak Pro Image 100 or the old Kodak VR 100 emulsion.

November: A new 35mm compact camera

And finally, we close out the year with a delightful surprise – a new 35mm compact camera! The new Kodak Snapic A1 is a fairly simple analog point-and-shoot, produced by licensee Reto Project who were also behind the Charmera. It came sporting a 25mm lens with three-element glass, as well as a double-exposure mode and a top-plate LCD screen. I actually have it on my desk for review for DCW as we speak, and am thoroughly looking forward to trying it out.

This ended a year that could fairly be described as a hot streak for Kodak, making it clear that we’ll be seeing lots more releases bearing the Kodak brand in 2026.