When it comes to Kodak moments, Windsor is going to be a bigger part of the picture.
The northern Colorado city will become home to Eastman Kodak Co.’s only color photo-paper plant in the Americas after the company announced Thursday that it would close a plant in Rochester, N.Y., and cut 1,000 jobs worldwide.
Windsor won’t gain jobs from the closure, said Lucille Mantelli, a local Kodak spokeswoman. But the added work should keep Windsor’s color photo-paper production lines busy and forestall layoffs from that division.
Kodak color photo paper also is made in Harrow, England.
Kodak employment in Windsor, which has faced fewer cuts than other plants in the firm’s restructuring, is expected to fall from 1,750 to 1,600 this year, said Mantelli. That will occur mostly through attrition and retirement, she said.
Kodak, which employs about 55,000 people worldwide, began a series of layoffs in early 2004 designed to shave 25,000 jobs by early 2007. A thousand jobs in Rochester, as well as in West Virginia and Xiamen, China, were the latest in a downsizing driven by the long-term shift from film to digital photography.
Besides color photo paper, Kodak’s Windsor operations produce almost all of the company’s X-ray and motion picture film.
Windsor workers also produce thermal inks and ribbons for digital photo kiosks.
Although film continues to lose ground to digital imaging, traditional photo paper is seeing a resurgence in popularity, said Ron Brown, a vice president with Photo Craft Imaging in Boulder.
Consumers are learning that printing photos at home isn’t cheap, the quality is poor and the photos don’t last, he said.
“The trend is that more and more photo images captured on digital are being printed on paper,” Brown said.
Staff writer Aldo Svaldi can be reached at 303-820-1410 or asvaldi@denverpost.com.
