History (1998): Seagate to Manufacture Kodak Advantix Film Drives

Seagate Technology was already a supplier of tape heads for Eastman Kodak. But the new agreement between the 2 companies is of a different nature. This time, both firms have formed an alliance to create and refine a technology bridge between the Advanced Photo System (APS) and the PC. Seagate will be exclusively licensed to manufacture and sell Advantix film drives, and will market the product to PC OEMs as an in-bay product and external peripheral.

So what exactly is this film drive? Basically, it’s a device in which a tiny APS photographic film can be inserted after exposure, in order to scan the images and subsequently read or write a small magnetic 4-track tape with information (title, date, format, etc.) about the photos. Once the images have been transferred onto a PC’s HDD, via the film drive, the user may manipulate or print them.

Up to now, Seagate has strayed very little from its principal activity of computer storage device manufacturing. There was a contract with Philips to manufacture magnetic heads for the now defunct DCC, an audio digital magnetic cassette drive.

The new Advantix business unit will be managed by the removable storage solutions group in Costa Mesa, CA.

Kevin Perry, Seagate’s VP marketing of tape operations, pointed out that his firm already manufactured Travan drives with a transport mechanism equipped with a tape wind system reasonably close to that required to advance photographic film. Moreover, the firm has chosen Singapore, where the same Travan drives are made, as the site for the production of the new film drives.

Even if Seagate is not a major player in the imaging market, it projects that potential customers for these drives will most likely be PC OEM clients for the firm’s storage devices.

Seagate does not plan, for the immediate future, to manufacture one of the key components of the film drive, the CCD photo scanner.

This article is an abstract of news published on issue 128 on September 1998 from the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter.