October 7th, 2005
The Digital Camera Turns 30 Today
Wow, and we thought digital cameras took off like rocket fuel, compared to things like the Internet and even cell phones. Who knew they were 30 YEARS in the making?
October 7, 2005 2005 marks the 30th anniversary of the one of the hottest consumer electronic products in the world today – the digital camera. In 1975, the world’s first digital photograph was taken at a Kodak lab in Rochester, NY, USA, in an event that preceded the Compact Disc, the Personal Computer and the Internet. In 1974 Steven Sasson, an engineer at Kodak’s Applied Electronics Research Centre, was tasked with devising an “electronic handheld still camera”. The following year his first working prototype – weighing 8.5 pounds, powered by 16 AA batteries and recording images on a cassette – took the first ever digital still camera photograph. Source: Gizmag
Ron Ingram says:
8.5 pounds, that’s like trying to take a picture with today’s microwave!
October 7th, 2005 at 10:50 am
Jimbo says:
Imagine the neck strap you’d have to wear for that camera. Wow.
October 7th, 2005 at 1:29 pm
Lockergnome's Tech News Watch says:
The Digital Camera Turns 30 Today
Wow, and we thought digital cameras took off like rocket fuel, compared to things like the Internet and even cell phones. Who knew they were 30 YEARS in the making? 2005 marks the 30th anniversary of the one of the hottest consumer electronic products …
October 7th, 2005 at 2:08 pm
thesuperstar says:
digital cameras are great. bought 2 in the last year, will buy another one this month. love it.
October 8th, 2005 at 8:31 am
Karl Shah-Jenner says:
In 1951, Bing Crosby laboratories introduces the first video tape recorder (VTR) captured live images from television cameras by converting the information into electrical impulses (digital) and saving the information onto magnetic tape. Digital camera technology is directly related to and
evolved from the same technology that recorded television images. I think this predates the Kodak model!
October 8th, 2005 at 9:50 am
Bob Shell says:
The video tape recorders introduced in the 50s recorded signals in analog form — not digital. In the early 90s there were cameras like Sony’s first Mavica cameras and some from Canon that were still video cameras. They recorded images onto miniature floppy disks, but the image files were analog. Your article is correct about Kodak making the first digital still cameras.
October 8th, 2005 at 3:24 pm
GregDV says:
So the question is, why did Kodak fall so far behind in the digital camera business? I suspect they had no interest in spending large research dollars to devise something to compete with the then profitable film business.
I read in the seventies that they were looking various technologies to replace silver halide chemistry because of the cost of silver, including nitrogen bubbles, but nothing had proven feasible.
It’s not unusual that the inventor of a technology fails to capitalize on it, such as Ampex and the VCR, Xerox and the desktop GUI and mouse, AT&T with C and Unix, and the laser, and the transistor.
October 8th, 2005 at 7:47 pm