The move, which had been expected, follows years of struggle by the film giant to transition to a digital imaging company. In recent months, the company has sought to capitalize on its patents and, in recent days, has sued Apple, HTC and Samsung.

Kodak said it hopes to emerge from bankruptcy in 2013 and intends to conduct business during the restructuring using $950 million in financing from Citigroup. As part of the move, the company said it has named Dominic DiNapoli, vice chairman of FTI Consulting, as its Chief Restructuring Officer.

Here’s the full text of the company’s press release:

ROCHESTER, N.Y.–(BUSINESS WIRE)– Eastman Kodak Company (“Kodak” or the “Company”) announced today that it and its U.S. subsidiaries filed voluntary petitions for chapter 11 business reorganization in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York.

The business reorganization is intended to bolster liquidity in the U.S. and abroad, monetize non-strategic intellectual property, fairly resolve legacy liabilities, and enable the Company to focus on its most valuable business lines. The Company has made pioneering investments in digital and materials deposition technologies in recent years, generating approximately 75% of its revenue from digital businesses in 2011.

Kodak has obtained a fully-committed, $950 million debtor-in-possession credit facility with an 18-month maturity from Citigroup to enhance liquidity and working capital. The credit facility is subject to Court approval and other conditions precedent. The Company believes that it has sufficient liquidity to operate its business during chapter 11, and to continue the flow of goods and services to its customers in the ordinary course.

Kodak expects to pay employee wages and benefits and continue customer programs. Subsidiaries outside of the U.S. are not subject to proceedings and will honor all obligations to suppliers, whenever incurred. Kodak and its U.S. subsidiaries will honor all post-petition obligations to suppliers in the ordinary course.

“Kodak is taking a significant step toward enabling our enterprise to complete its transformation,” said Antonio M. Perez, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer. “At the same time as we have created our digital business, we have also already effectively exited certain traditional operations, closing 13 manufacturing plants and 130 processing labs, and reducing our workforce by 47,000 since 2003. Now we must complete the transformation by further addressing our cost structure and effectively monetizing non-core IP assets. We look forward to working with our stakeholders to emerge a lean, world-class, digital imaging and materials science company.”

“After considering the advantages of chapter 11 at this time, the Board of Directors and the entire senior management team unanimously believe that this is a necessary step and the right thing to do for the future of Kodak,” Mr. Perez continued. “Our goal is to maximize value for stakeholders, including our employees, retirees, creditors, and pension trustees. We are also committed to working with our valued customers.

“Chapter 11 gives us the best opportunities to maximize the value in two critical parts of our technology portfolio: our digital capture patents, which are essential for a wide range of mobile and other consumer electronic devices that capture digital images and have generated over $3 billion of licensing revenues since 2003; and our breakthrough printing and deposition technologies, which give Kodak a competitive advantage in our growing digital businesses.”

Mr. Perez concluded, “The Board of Directors, the senior management team and I would like to underscore our appreciation for the hard work and loyalty of our employees. Kodak exemplifies a culture of collaboration and innovation. Our employees embody that culture and are essential to our future success.”
Kodak has taken this step after preliminary discussions with key constituencies and intends to work toward a consensual reorganization in the best interests of its stakeholders. Kodak expects to complete its U.S.-based restructuring during 2013.

The Company and its Board of Directors are being advised by Lazard, FTI Consulting Inc. and Sullivan & Cromwell LLP. In addition, Dominic DiNapoli, Vice Chairman of FTI Consulting, will serve as Chief Restructuring Officer to support the management team as to restructuring matters during the chapter 11 case.
More information about Kodak’s Chapter 11 filing is available on the Internet at www.kodaktransforms.com. Information for suppliers and vendors is available at (800) 544-7009 or (585) 724-6100.

Kodak will be filing monthly operating reports with the Bankruptcy Court and also plans to post these monthly operating reports on the Investor Relations section of Kodak.com. The Company will continue to file quarterly and annual reports with the Securities and Exchange Commission, which will also be available in the Investor Relations section of Kodak.com.

The new executive would report to the board and could have broad powers to manage Kodak’s finances and operations.

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Late Tuesday, the company filed suit against Apple and HTC claiming they’ve infringed upon a handful of patents on technologies for transmitting digital images from cameras and other devices.

Kodak’s complaint covers Apple’s iPad 2, iPhone 3G, iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, iPhone 4S, and iPod touch, and a number of HTC tablets and phones — the Flyer, EVO View 4G, Vivid, Hero S, etc. And it seeks a proscription against further infringement as well as damages. But what Kodak’s really looking for here are the royalties.

As Tim Lynch, Kodak’s Chief IP officer, notes in a statement announcing the suit, “We remain open to negotiating a fair and amicable agreement with these companies, which has always been our preference and our practice with other licensees.”

News of the suits comes amid reports that Kodak is contemplating Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

The struggling photography icon, which employs about 19,000 people, is in discussions with potential lenders for around $1 billion in so-called debtor-in possession financing that would keep it afloat during bankruptcy proceedings, the people said. A filing could occur as soon as this month or early February, one of the people said.

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The Flip Camera
San Jose, Calif. — The Cisco Flip, a beloved handheld video recorder, was killed on April 12, 2011. Its untimely death was a result of the realignment of Cisco’s consumer electronics business.

Born in May 2006 as the Pure Digital Point & Shoot, the pocket camera went through many evolutions in its lifetime, later becoming the Flip Ultra and spawning the Flip Mino and Flip MinoHD. It found a new home in 2009, when it was acquired by Cisco for $590 million. The Flip was known as the life of the party at birthday and wedding celebrations, and will be remembered for its simplistic design and pop-out USB arm. “People literally flipped for the Flip when it first came out,” a friend of its parents, Pure Digital, said. It is survived by a number of boiled-down point-and-shoots and countless smartphone cameras, as well as video-sharing apps with annoyingly cute names like “Viddy.”

Its distant cousin, the Kodak Zi8, also went missing from the Kodak store earlier this year.

Guitar Hero
Santa Monica, Calif. — For Guitar Hero, Feb. 9, 2011, was the day the music died. The videogame franchise was killed when Activision announced during its fourth-quarter earnings call that it was shuttering the business unit dedicated to Guitar Hero.

The popular game was born in 2005 to Red Octane and Harmonix, and was distributed by Activision. Later iterations of Guitar Hero, which were developed by Neversoft, had band-specific titles and also incorporated more instrumental props, so fans could play drums or sing as well as play guitar.

But Guitar Hero sales fell off, and the game was eventually overshadowed by its record-breaking Activision siblings, the Call of Duty and World of Warcraft series. Revenues of Guitar Hero fell from $1.7 billion in 2008 to about $300 million in 2010.

Guitar Hero will be remembered for its love of music, with Aerosmith, Metallica and Van Halen among its favorite artists, and for creating living-room rock arenas for millions of users.

Guitar Hero is survived by Rock Band, Rocksmith, Rock Revolution and likely many other console and mobile games starting with “Rock” that we’re not aware of or haven’t been invented yet.

HP TouchPad
Palo Alto, Calif. — That flame which doth burn brightest often burns out quickly, or something like that.

The HP TouchPad was effectively killed on Aug. 18, 2011, at the young age of just 49 (that’s days). Prior to its demise, the TouchPad was praised for its bright 9.7-inch display, Beats audio and mostly for the fact that it ran HP’s intuitive webOS mobile operating system, though the tablet ultimately saw disappointing sales during its short life.

Hewlett-Packard, its maker, said webOS devices had not gained enough traction in the marketplace with consumers, and couldn’t justify continuing to produce hardware like the TouchPad around it.

HP’s new CEO, Meg Whitman, said later on, “I think we’ve got to walk before we run here.” The TouchPad is survived by a newly open source webOS system and a cult of rabid fans, as evidenced by its post-mortem fire sales. It joins the Microsoft Kin phone in a special Afterlife for Tech Products Less Than 50 Days Old, while its operating system remains in a state of purgatory.

Dell Streak Tablets and Mini 10 Netbook
Round Rock, Texas — The streak was not a long one.

Dell’s Streak 5 tablet, which was originally demoed at D8 in 2010, disappeared from store shelves in mid-August of this year. Dell hardly had time to recover from the loss before its sibling, the Dell Streak 7, was also discontinued.

Shortly after the loss of the Streak tablet, tragedy again struck the Dell family, when Dell confirmed it would no longer make consumer netbooks, feeling the pressure of tablets as well as an emerging shift toward thin, light “ultrabooks” in the laptop category. The Dell Mini 10 was known for being small, as netbooks are, and for being that laptop you knew you could always fit on the seatback tray on an airplane.

Apple MobileMe
Cupertino, Calif. — June 6, 2011, was Steve Jobs’s last appearance at an Apple Worldwide Developers Conference. It was also the day MobileMe effectively went away, with Jobs saying the $99 dollar service wasn’t Apple’s “finest hour.”

MobileMe launched at WWDC in July of 2008, and was meant to sync calendars, emails, bookmarks and photo galleries. For individual accounts, it came with 20 gigabytes of online storage and 200GB of monthly data transfer.

While great in theory, our friend MobileMe was not without flaws. In fact, AllThingsD’s Walt Mossberg said, in his review of the service, that MobileMe was “far too flawed to be reliable.”

Apple’s Internet-based sync services since 2000 have evolved, but have never truly gone away: Like an actual ghost, we know they’re there, and we see glimpses of how they work, but they still elude many people. MobileMe, in its earliest form, was iTools, and later on, the subscription service .Mac. Even now, we’re not entirely sure whether MobileMe was killed or simply reincarnated as something new — in this case, iCloud.

Adobe Flash on Mobile
San Jose, Calif. — This is the way mobile Flash ends: Not with a bang, but a whimper.

On Nov. 9, Adobe said it would no longer be developing Flash, its platform for interactive and rich media content, for mobile devices.

Macromedia Flash was born in 1997, the spawn of FutureWave’s FutureSplash Animator. Macromedia was acquired by Adobe Systems in 2005, thus becoming Adobe Flash.
As smartphone and tablet wars heated up in recent years, Flash support became one of the features that iPad competitors — mainly Google Android devices — touted to set themselves apart from Apple’s mobile products.

The tech world has contemplated what this could all mean for the future of Flash. As AllThingsD’s Ina Fried wrote, Flash’s death on mobile was seen as a vindication for the late Steve Jobs, who took a controversial stand by not supporting Flash on Apple’s mobile products. Could Jobs once again have seen the future? Flash is not a completely dead standard yet, but with developers increasingly adopting HTML5 as the new standard for Web language, it’s unclear what exactly will become of Flash.

Google Buzz
Mountain View, Calif. — A standard housecleaning session turned fatal this past October when Google pulled the plug on its social networking effort. Google Buzz, the predecessor to Google+, aimed to create a social network through Gmail.

Social and gregarious by nature, Google Buzz was born in February of 2010. Its early life was filled with strife, as users struggled to grasp the real-time social interactions that were occurring within email chains, and real privacy concerns emerged.

Despite its short life span, the memory of Google Buzz surely remains, as the search giant eventually had to settle with the FTC over privacy violations and is now committed to 20 years of privacy audits.

Memories, indeed.

Google Buzz is survived by Google+, and follows Friendster and Myspace to the social graveyard, although technically those still exist.

Readers, what do you think was the greatest tech product loss in 2011?

The people said the onetime film giant has approached photo-sharing websites, competitors, private-equity firms and retailers about buying the unit, which enables users to store their digital photos and print them out into scrapbooks, cards and calendars for a fee.

The Rochester, N.Y.-based company is seeking “hundreds of millions of dollars” for Kodak Gallery, according to a person who has been approached to buy the business. But the site has been losing users in recent years, and the drop in traffic is a big deterrent to potential buyers, people who were approached say.

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The cautionary statement, in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, came as the company reported another drop in cash in for third quarter, even after it drew $160 million from its credit line.

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Imax will pay Kodak an upfront fee of tens of millions of dollars — but less than $50 million — and will pay recurring royalties and other payments as it uses the Kodak patents to make products, said a person familiar with the matter.

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The move to hire restructuring lawyers signals Kodak is intensifying efforts to ensure it has the financial wherewithal to complete a difficult strategic and financial revamp. Shares in the 131-year-old company have lost around a third of their value this week following Kodak’s disclosure that it pulled $160 million from a credit line.

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Kodak CEO Antonio Perez says interest in that portion of its patent portfolio has been running high since the company began shopping it around earlier this summer, and already a number of potential buyers are evaluating it. Reportedly among them: Apple, Google, Samsung and Microsoft.

“At the moment we announced [the sale], the phone started to ring,” he told Bloomberg. “… This is the right time. The conversations are going. We are hoping quickly to get to a good conclusion.”

Right time, indeed. Given the current bull market for patents, the 1,100 or so Kodak is shopping around could fetch as much as $3 billion, according to IP investment bank MDB Capital Group. That’s more than five times the struggling company’s market capitalization. “There are some pretty crucial patents here, and there are a lot of people who should be very interested in buying these,” said MDB Capital CEO Chris Marlett. “The auction for the sale of these patents is going to underscore that there’s a big disconnect between the value of the IP and the value of the stock.”

Investment bank Lazard Ltd. began marketing the portfolio this week, reaching out to companies that might be interested, said a person familiar with the matter. One interested company is a large, strategic buyer in the wireless industry looking to use the patents for defensive protection, said another person familiar with the matter.

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Lousy news for Apple, particularly since the ITC is still reviewing Kodak’s claims that two of its patents generally covering image preview and processing have been used illegitimately in the iPhone. In June, the Commission said it had decided to “affirm in part, reverse in part, and remand in part,” a ruling of an administrative law judge who found Apple (and Research In Motion, as well), hadn’t infringed Kodak’s patents.

A decision in that case is expected on Aug. 30 and if it goes Kodak’s way could force Apple to pay the imaging company royalties. But as the commenter below notes, it might be cheaper for Cupertino to simply acquire Kodak.

The U.S. International Trade Commission issued a split ruling today on Kodak’s suit charging that Apple’s iPhone and Research In Motion’s BlackBerry violate its patent on an image-preview function in smartphones. The commission did some upholding, some modifying and some clarifying (mostly not helpful to Kodak’s cause) and ultimately sent the preliminary findings back to the administrative law judge for further review. The commission’s new target date is Aug. 30 — unless the judge sees the need for more time.

Kodak looked for the brightest spot it could find in the news and expressed continued confidence. After-hours investors, not so much.