Carestream Dental Brand Guidelines: Kodak, Trophy & the RVG Lineage

Kodak film, French X-ray and Atlanta software.

Carestream Dental is a dental imaging and software company with its corporate headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia. The name is fairly recent — Unident, its Russian distributor, wrote in 2017 that the brand appeared in 2007 — but the business was assembled from three older ones: the dental work of Eastman Kodak, the French X-ray maker Trophy Radiologie and the Atlanta software company PracticeWorks. In an October 2018 report in the German dental trade journal ZWP online, Carestream Dental itself named Kodak, Trophy and PracticeWorks as the heritage brands behind a 120-year history.

Kodak’s part goes back to the first years of X-ray imaging: Unident’s 2017 history says Kodak made its first X-ray plates and paper in 1896, the year after X-rays were made public. Trophy Radiologie was founded in France in 1946 by two engineers, the same account says, and its dental devices reached the market in the late 1960s; Unident credits it with the first digital intraoral sensor and with radiovisiography, a method that sends the X-ray image straight to a monitor. The RVG name lives on in Carestream Dental’s current intraoral sensors.

PracticeWorks, a maker of dental practice-management software, bought Trophy in December 2002. On 21 July 2003 Kodak announced that it would acquire PracticeWorks and so become the full owner of Trophy, which DentistryIQ described as a Paris-based developer and manufacturer of dental digital radiography equipment. Kodak completed the purchase on 9 October 2003, DentistryIQ reported, and the two companies joined the Dental Systems group within Kodak’s Health Imaging Group as separate subsidiaries. At the announcement, the president of Kodak’s Health Imaging Group said the company would be able to offer “a full spectrum of dental imaging products and services — from traditional film to digital radiography and photography,” and to link dental images with patient records.

From Kodak to Carestream to independence.

In 2007 Kodak sold its Health Group to the Canadian investment firm Onex Corporation, and the business was renamed Carestream Health, English Wikipedia says. Dental was one part of a wider company that also made medical X-ray systems, printers and film. In April 2017 Carestream Health agreed to sell its dental digital business to the private equity firm Clayton, Dubilier & Rice (CD&R) and CareCapital Advisors, part of the Hillhouse Capital group; the dental X-ray film and anaesthetics business stayed with Carestream Health, according to the same article.

ZWP online dates the completed acquisition to 1 September 2017, from which point Carestream Dental was an independent company focused only on digital products. In its first year on its own, the journal reported, it released software updates for its CS 3600 intraoral scanner and the CS Model+ orthodontic software module, and its CS 8100SC 3D imaging system received an Edison Award; the company also said it had sold the 20,000th unit of its CS 8100 family.

The scanners did not stay. On 20 April 2022 the American dental group Envista announced that it had completed its purchase of Carestream Dental’s intraoral scanner business, which it said would be rebranded DEXIS and run within its equipment and consumables segment. Envista’s announcement said the deal did not include Carestream Dental’s imaging equipment or practice-management businesses.

Those two businesses are what the Carestream Dental name carries today. Its website lists intraoral X-ray units, sensors, imaging-plate systems and an intraoral camera on one side, and panoramic and cone-beam CT systems on the other, alongside imaging software and practice-management support.

Chairs, X-ray and the trade.

Dental equipment makers sell to a narrow audience — dentists, clinic groups, dental schools and the dealers who supply them — and their brands are built around a handful of recurring scenes. The treatment unit is the centrepiece: a patient chair with its instrument delivery, operating light and assistant’s element, usually photographed in a clean, bright surgery, either empty or with a clinician and patient posed mid-appointment.

Imaging has its own visual language. Panoramic and cone-beam CT units are shown in rooms of their own, intraoral X-ray arms are fixed to the wall beside the chair, and sensors and intraoral scanners appear in the hand, often next to the screen that displays the result. Software is shown as screenshots: a 3D skull, an arch of teeth, an implant plan. Handpieces get the close-up treatment of precision tools, while sterilisers and washers belong to the back room, photographed as white boxes on a clean counter.

The trade has its own calendar. The International Dental Show (IDS) in Cologne, held every two years, is where many makers launch products; Planmeca, for one, says it introduced a digital imaging system there in 1995. National dental meetings in North America, Europe and Asia fill the years between, and trade publications such as Dental Tribune report the launches and the takeovers.

Ownership in the sector changes often. Family-owned makers sit alongside listed groups and private-equity-backed companies, and brands move between them: Kodak’s dental business became part of Carestream Health and then Carestream Dental, and KaVo’s treatment unit and instrument business passed from Envista to Planmeca at the start of 2022. This guide sets out what can be checked about each maker — its founding, its owners and its products — and marks clearly what rests on the company’s own word.

Imaging, software and a long lineage.

The current range is organised by family. Intraoral imaging covers the CS 2200 X-ray unit, the CS 2500P handheld unit and the RVG 6200 and RVG 5200 sensors. Extraoral imaging covers the CS 8100 panoramic unit and the CS 8200 3D and CS 9600 cone-beam CT systems. Software includes CS Imaging and CS 3D Imaging, and the company also offers implant-planning services under the Swissmeda name. Its support pages still carry the practice-management names SoftDent, PracticeWorks, OrthoTrac and WinOMS, alongside the cloud system Sensei Cloud.

The company describes its mission as “transforming dentistry, simplifying technology and changing lives,” and says it focuses on cloud solutions and technology for practice and clinical management for dental practices, groups and dental service organisations. It sets out five company values in single words or short phrases: Believe, Own It, Transform, Anticipate and Deliver. Its leadership page names separate presidents for Imaging Technology Solutions and for Sensei, its practice-management business. The name should not be confused with Carestream Health, the medical imaging company that sold the dental business in 2017 and keeps the Carestream name for its own products.

For a design guide, Carestream Dental shows how a brand can carry a long imaging lineage — Kodak film, Trophy’s sensors, the RVG name — through several changes of owner. Compare VATECH, another maker of dental X-ray and cone-beam CT systems, and Planmeca, which combines treatment units, imaging and software. For this guide we use film black, a lightbox white and an amber accent with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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