The Chinon camera company was the brainchild of a young Japanese entrepreneur, Hiroshi Chinon, who founded the company in 1948. With manufacturing facilities in  Tokyo and Suwa City, the company initially made lens components for the top Japanese camera brands, and later manufactured complete cameras and lenses in the names of many top camera makes. Later still in the early 1970s the company, which had by now earned a reputation for quality, value and innovation, started manufacturing still and 8mm movie cameras in its own name.  During the mid 1970s, the company was reputedly responsible for around 40% of world production of home movie cameras, a dominant position which continued until the early 1980s when video began to make rapid inroads into the movie market and quickly resulted in losses for the company. 

In response to this downturn, in 1983 the company formed a co-operation with NEC (Nippon Electric Company) to co-develop 8mm video, and 2 years later entered another agreement to manufacture 35mm still cameras under the Kodak brand name. Again however, dark clouds were looming over the horizon for the film industry with the demonstration of an analogue electronic camera  by Sony in 1981 (the original Mavica) and the commercial introduction of the Canon RC701 in 1986 using similar technology. In 1988,  the first true digital still camera was demonstrated, the Fuji DS-1P,  and  the first commercial digital still camera, the Dycam Model 1 was introduced in 1990.  

From this time on, the traditional film camera industry became divided into those companies which had the resources and vision to invest early in developing the new digital technology and those which hesitated and quickly lost their market position. The next 10 years would see the rapid demise of the traditional camera industry as market demand exploded for the popular "instant gratification" digital cameras. Chinon was unable to come through this period on its own, and after making losses over the period 1994 - 1997,  the company was taken over by Kodak to produce various Kodak products including Kodak digital cameras.