By MIKE BARRIS

Eastman Kodak Co. said Monday it will discontinue its iconic Kodachrome color film this year due to tumbling sales as photographers embrace newer Kodak films or digital-imaging technology.

Kodak introduced the amateur color film in 1935 and it became the first commercially successful color film. But sales are just a fraction of 1% of the company's still-picture film revenue. The company doesn't break out such figures, but the segment in which Kodak's film sales are recorded had first-quarter revenue of $503 million.

Those numbers and the unique materials needed to make it convinced Kodak to call its most recent manufacturing run the last, said Mary Jane Hellyar, the outgoing president of Kodak's film, photofinishing and entertainment group.

"Kodachrome is particularly difficult [to retire] because it really has become kind of an icon,'' Ms. Hellyar said.

It was the basis not only for countless family slideshows on carousel projectors over the years but also for world-renowned images, including Abraham Zapruder's 8 mm reel of President John F. Kennedy's assassination on Nov. 22, 1963.

The last rolls of the film will be donated to George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film in Rochester, N.Y., which houses the world's largest collection of cameras and related artifacts. In addition, Steve McCurry—known for a 1985 photo of a young Afghan girl peering from the cover of National Geographic magazine—will shoot one of those last rolls and the images will be donated to Eastman House.

"I want to take [the last roll] with me and somehow make every frame count... just as a way to honor the memory and always be able to look back with fond memories at how it capped and ended my shooting Kodachrome,'' Mr. McCurry said last week from Singapore, where he has an exhibition.

Kodak estimates that current supplies of the film—which is slide or transparency film, not the more familiar color negative film—will last until early this fall.

The Kodachrome output stoppage is another sign of the company's transition—by 2004, the company that marketed its first snapshot camera in 1888 had stopped making film cameras.

The company thought that when it completed a wrenching multi-year transition to having a digital focus at the end of 2007 that its restructuring was behind it. But a continued sales slump has resulted in more retrenchment, Kodak in January announced plans to cut another 3,500 to 4,500 jobs, as much as 18% of its work force, this year.