Carestream Brand Guidelines: Kodak’s X-Ray Business, Onex, Lenders & a 2025 Split

A film company that went into X-rays a year after their discovery.

Carestream is not a young company with a new name so much as an old business with a new one. Until 2007 it was the Health Group of Eastman Kodak, the photographic company of Rochester, New York, and its roots go back to the first years of radiography. Kodak’s own published timeline says that in 1896, one year after the discovery of X-rays, George Eastman’s company agreed to supply plates and paper for the new process.

Medical imaging grew into a large part of Kodak. Its timeline credits the X-OMAT processor, introduced in the 1950s, with cutting the time needed to develop an X-ray film from about an hour to six minutes, and records that the company had sold its 100,000th X-OMAT processor by 1992. In the same year, Kodak says, its INSIGHT thoracic imaging system received an R&D 100 award.

From the late 1990s the group bought its way into digital and dry imaging. Kodak’s timeline lists the purchase in 1998 of most of Imation’s worldwide medical imaging business, including the DryView laser imaging line; the acquisition of Lumisys, a maker of desktop computed radiography systems and film digitisers, at the end of 2000; the launch of the DirectView DR 9000 and DR 5000 digital radiography systems in the same year; and the purchase of OREX Computed Radiography in 2005.

In 2007 Kodak completed the sale of its Health Group to an affiliate of Onex Corporation, the Toronto investment firm. English Wikipedia says around 8,100 employees moved with the business, which was renamed Carestream Health. The Rochester Beacon still described it in 2022 as “the former Kodak Health unit,” and the company remains headquartered in Rochester, its company profile says.

Detectors, mobile X-ray, film and coatings.

Carestream’s products sit in the radiology room rather than the ultrasound clinic. Its company profile, dated 2022 and revised in 2023, describes X-ray imaging rooms, mobile X-ray units that bring imaging to the bedside, a system combining fluoroscopy and general radiography in one compact unit, and a family of DRX digital radiography detectors — wireless, shareable and fixed, in several sizes. English Wikipedia names the DRX-1, a wireless detector that links to the computer of a fixed room or a mobile unit.

Some of the company’s product claims are its own. The profile says the DRX-Revolution mobile system “introduced the industry’s first collapsible column,” and calls the Lux 35 a glass-free detector. Software runs under the Eclipse name, which the company describes as its image-processing platform with artificial intelligence. Carestream also sells retrofit kits that convert older film or computed radiography rooms to wireless digital capture, and in August 2025 it announced changes to its Horizon X-ray system.

The Kodak inheritance is still visible. The profile lists laser imagers that print CT, MRI, ultrasound and X-ray images on dry laser film, and English Wikipedia lists X-ray film for general radiography and mammography among the company’s products. Outside medicine, Carestream NDT makes X-ray imaging systems for non-destructive testing — used for applications such as aircraft inspection, assemblies, castings and forensics — under the INDUSTREX name, and in May 2026 the company said that unit had won Stevie awards at that year’s American Business Awards.

A third business is the least visible: precision contract coating. The company says it applies roll-to-roll coating processes in large-scale plants for customers in energy storage, electronics, displays and automotive components.

The brand itself is presented plainly. The company publishes its own brand guidelines, and its product names follow a technical pattern: capitals and model codes such as DRX, rather than consumer-style names.

Imaging makers and how they present themselves.

Ultrasound and medical imaging makers sell to a small, expert audience, and their brands are built to be read in clinical rooms rather than shop windows. A typical ultrasound system is a grey and white console on wheels, parked beside a hospital bed, with a touch panel, a keyboard of controls and a row of probes hanging from its side. The maker’s name usually sits small on the front or the monitor frame; the shape, the colour of the plastics and the layout of the controls do much of the brand’s work.

The screen matters as much as the shell. Scan screens are typically dark and blue-grey, with the greyscale image at the centre, and makers give their measurement tools, presets and assistant features their own product names. Newer handheld scanners shrink the console to a single probe that connects to a phone or tablet, so the app becomes the visible face of the brand.

Larger imaging equipment, such as X-ray, CT, MRI and mammography systems, lives in radiology suites, where the machine is often a white ring or open frame in a quiet room. Here the brand appears on the gantry, in the room’s lighting and on the operator console next door. Several makers in this guide build dedicated or open MRI and digital radiography alongside ultrasound.

Much of this branding is shown first at trade fairs. The annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) in Chicago and the European Congress of Radiology (ECR) are where makers launch systems, stage booths and present new software, and both Samsung and Esaote have used them for product introductions. Ownership also changes often in this field: brands pass between state groups, investors and larger industrial companies while keeping their names.

Onex, the lenders and Midea.

Under Onex the company was gradually taken apart. In April 2017, English Wikipedia says, Carestream agreed to sell its dental digital business to the private equity firms Clayton, Dubilier & Rice and Hillhouse Capital, while dental X-ray film stayed with Carestream Health; the Rochester Beacon reported in 2022 that Onex had sold the dental imaging business ten years after buying the group, and had begun in 2021 to explore selling the medical imaging side too.

In August 2022 Carestream filed for Chapter 11 in the United States, as the final step of a recapitalisation agreed with its lenders that April, the Rochester Beacon reported; the filing did not cover its businesses abroad. On 30 September 2022 the company said it had emerged from Chapter 11 and that certain of its existing lenders had become its new owners. Its 2023 company profile names Apollo Global Management, Brigade Capital Management, CION Investments and Vector Capital among its largest shareholders.

A second change came at the end of 2025. On 31 December 2025 Carestream said it had split into two geographically focused companies: Carestream Health, keeping its United States commercial and manufacturing operations, its film manufacturing in Mexico, and its film and non-destructive testing business in China; and Carestream International, formerly Rayco (Shanghai) Medical Products, which was acquired by affiliates of Midea Group, which is listed in Shenzhen and Hong Kong. Imaging Technology News reported the separation in January 2026. In March 2026 the company said it had completed a refinancing of its debt, and in October 2026 it reported a credit-rating upgrade from Moody’s.

For a design guide, Carestream shows how a medical brand can carry a long industrial lineage under a name chosen only in 2007. Compare GE HealthCare and Siemens Healthineers, two other X-ray makers whose names have changed over time. For this guide we use a deep teal, lightbox white and a detector grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Carestream’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.