Kodak's fourth and final objective was to deal "in a fair way" with its legacy liabilities, including employee and retirees health and pension costs.

"This is the path to come out of Chapter 11. We have a lot of cash outside the US and now we have cash in the US because we have a deal," he continued. "And we’re solving the legacy liability and we are getting those resolved under the process of Chapter 11 in a fair way for all parties.

"All this is part of the process of coming out of Chapter 11 in 2013. We’ve given an indication that mid-year is a good time for us to come out - it could be a little earlier it could be at mid-year. But we have to solve all these issues and we’re making a lot of progress with every one of those."

Brand damage

Perez dismissed any notion that Kodak won’t emerge from Chapter 11, but did concede that there was some concern the whole bankruptcy would damage what had been a sterling global brand.

"I can’t even tell you the amount of calls I got from CEOs asking what was going on because the press has presented this like it was the demise of Kodak, which was wrong to do that," Perez said.

"The best arguments I can give you that is have not affected the brand are two-fold. One is suppliers. Suppliers normally shy away from companies that are in Chapter 11 and they don’t want to serve them or they ask the companies to pay them upfront. But that didn’t happen to us. We are paying basically very close to the same terms as before we filed.

"The second is customers - we saw at the beginning that for big deals, customers requested to talk to me, which sometime they used to [before Chapter 11] but most of the time they didn’t. So for the first few months they wanted to talk to me and make sure we were going to be around. But after we showed at Drupa these 10 incredible introductions - as well as the 40 other booths with our technology - that kind of disappeared. People could see that it was business as usual and we haven’t seen any issues since."

Kodak Prosper

Kodak's digital Prosper press line is obviously one the keys to its future and while Perez would not be drawn on specific sales figures for the Prosper 5000XL and Prosper 6000XL series, he did say he expected sales and profits to ramp up next year.

"We are satisfied with the sales - in fact we are telling customers not to buy the next Prosper until they take the Prosper that they have to full speed because many of them are not using the Prosper they have to its full potential," he said, citing the addition of a pre-coater as one step printers can take to increase profitability on their existing Prosper presses.

"They can make a lot more money with the pre-coater [because] they can save a lot of money and they can run the press faster because they can use better paper for the ink than they’re using today," he said. "We make the money when the press is used seven days a week, 24 hours a day - that’s the best result for us - it's not the number of installations and the number of pages that are being printed."

Perez did note that 5.6bn pages were printed in 2011 on Prosper presses, and said that a shift to more standardized manufacturing will help Kodak lower Prosper costs and thereby boost sales. "Can we go faster in installing presses? I can assure you that we will in 2013 because now we are at a point where our manufacturing is more standardized and lowering the manufacturing costs of the presses will enable us to sell more [of them]."