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CNet Tracks the History of the Digital Camera
Abby Donivosif writes "CNet has up an article about the history of the digital camera. It's fascinating to note how far the technology has come in such a short amount of time. 'The camera generally recognized as the first digital still snapper was a prototype developed by Eastman Kodak engineer Steven Sasson in 1975. He cobbled together some Motorola parts with a Kodak movie-camera lens and some newly invented Fairchild CCD electronic sensors. The resulting camera, pictured above on its first trip to Europe recently, was the size of a large toaster and weighed nearly 4kg. Black-and-white images were captured on a digital cassette tape, and viewing them required Sasson and his colleagues to develop a special screen.'"
I remember an article by Steve Ciarcia about how to make a camera with memory chip that wasn't actually designed to be a sensor, IIRC. That was back when Byte magazine was a must-have (it started to go down the tubes when they let Jerry Pournelle start his column.)
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Oof, the powershot 600. I think I still have mine kicking around here somewhere. Anyone care to pony up $949? I'll include a parallel cable for free!
Yes, I recall the days of 320x240 and 640x480. Great times I'm sure.
As a digital photographer, I've come to appreciate the people behind the physical camera. Both technological and artistic.
As for future cameras, I think we'll see initially, 3x sensors allowing for on the fly HDR images. After that we'll go to static video where a framed shot can be spun around to see all the out of frame info.
After that, I suppose we'll get selective depth of field, on the fly image editing, blemish correction and on the fly multi-image splicing allowing for a static family photo to be created via sliced video.
Of course we'll have meta data including temperature, GPS, wind speed, angle, height, surrounding buildings, photographer's personal ID#, satellite upload, etc.
Film will die in the same way that pinhole cameras are dead. Sure, it's around and you can use it but what's the point? The medium isn't the art. It's the person behind the camera.
Wasn't it the board of directors of Kodak who decide to not go the digital route, summing it up with the statement "If it doesn't contain silver halide, its not really photography" ?
. waterwingz
What about the future of the digital camera? The CCD is reaching the end of it's useable life. They are just packing more and more pixels in, when really what you need is more levels of greyscale and a better signal to noise ratio. I'm wondering when they'll get rid of CCD entirely and move to a 4 "pixel" sensor with a DLP chip in between handling the scanning, instead of a bunch of piddly pixels on a 1/3" ccd. The sensors could be larger, with focusing lenses in between. The color isolation would be perfect. Plus you could use variable filtering/exposure PER COLOR based on the ambient light to do true (not digital enhancement after capture) white balancing. There's no reason a DLP couldn't work in reverse, I don't think. Other possibilities include nanotubes "tuned" to certain visible frequencies that cause them to vibrate slightly, etc.
There's also the liquid lenses such as Varioptic, which are going to change what we know about photography. Coupled with GIS/GPS I think we're in for a great next century.
Cool! Amazing Toys.
It's too bad they didn't include the first digital picture, that would have been neat to see. I couldn't find it on google, but I didn't really spend that long looking.
Hopefully they still have it kicking around somewhere. The comments in the CNET article suggest they know what the picture was of but I guess they couldn't find it either.
The resulting camera, pictured above on its first trip to Europe recently, was the size of a large toaster and weighed nearly 4kg. Black-and-white images were captured on a digital cassette tape, and viewing them required Sasson and his colleagues to develop a special screen.
Even if those conditions were the norm today, I guarantee you, pr0n would still be widely available in that format. and it would be completely awesome.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Thankfully, Steven Sasson did not feel that nobody will ever need more that 0.01 megapixels:)
hilarious
Yes, I recall the days of 320x240 and 640x480. Great times I'm sure.
NEXT-->
As a digital photographer, I've come to appreciate the people behind the physical camera. Both technological and artistic.
NEXT-->
As for future cameras, I think we'll see initially, 3x sensors allowing for on the fly HDR images. After that we'll go to static video where a framed shot can be spun around to see all the out of frame info.
NEXT-->
After that, I suppose we'll get selective depth of field, on the fly image editing, blemish correction and on the fly multi-image splicing allowing for a static family photo to be created via sliced video.
NEXT-->
Of course we'll have meta data including temperature, GPS, wind speed, angle, height, surrounding buildings, photographer's personal ID#, satellite upload, etc.
NEXT-->
Film will die in the same way that pinhole cameras are dead. Sure, it's around and you can use it but what's the point? The medium isn't the art. It's the person behind the camera.
Operator, give me the number for 911!
... and I only can because of digital, since I'm poor.
I recently bought a Panasonic FZ50 camera (super-sharp optically stabilized 35-420mm equivalent lens, f/2.8-3.7, 10MP 1/1.8" sensor, all the interesting bells and whistles) for $400. It's absolutely amazing; my only complaint is that the image processing software does some stupid things at ISO 400 or above related to boneheaded noise reduction, and you can bypass all that by shooting RAW. You can get a smaller model with a smaller sensor and fewer bells and whistles (the FZ8) for $250. In SLR-land (digital or otherwise), $400 gets you one lens, and you need quite a few of them to cover the 35-420 f/2.8-3.7 (or 28-504 f/2.8-4.2, for the Panasonic FZ18) range of the all-in-one superzooms.
The price you pay for this is signal-to-noise ratio, but the high ISO performance of even today's small sensors is better than that of film.
The most impressive thing to me about digital camera development is that serious photography is now within pretty much anyone's budget. It doesn't really make that much possible that wasn't possible before, but now it's all possible for amateurs with a reasonably inexpensive camera and free software.
I like my digital cameras but my film cameras still get plenty of use. For astrophotography using cooled digital SBIG CCD sensors on my Takahashi TOA-130 APO and Celestron CGE 1100 with the capability to stack multiple images is the only way to go. Computer controlled, sitting inside snapping images in my office at my PC with autoguide over the net... Beats the old film days of freezing my butt off, sensitizing/loading the film and playing games with the developing. Yuk. On the other hand, when out in the field doing outdoor photos I still love film, particularly B/W, getting harder to find though. Sure digital is fast and fun but I can't play Ansel Adams...
FWIW, Jerry Pournelle's column had started at least a couple of years before that article - Jerry and Steve were Byte's two leading columnists in the first half of the 1980's - they were in separate enough niches that there wasn't much in the way of competition between them. What caused Byte to go downhill was McGraw-Hill wanting it to be more like PC Magazine and less like the pioneering microcomputer magazine it was from 1975 to ca 1986. This is when Steve Ciarcia decided it was time to leave Byte and start his own rag, which is still doing well - and Byte ceased publication with the July 1998 issue.
I do miss the theme issues from the early years of Byte.
Good thing this story came up. What does slashdot think of the 7.5 MP cameras at Radio Shack? They're under $200.
(by the way, excellent article and photos, really enjoyed it!)
So, you're saying Kodak had the first digital camera in their house (and later, they produced Apple's digital cameras - read the article, you'll see..), and Kodak is today in commercial difficulties because their film business is failing - because of digital cameras' success?
While I have the greatest admiration for Kkodak's engineers and workers, to Kodak as a company I have to say: WHAT WERE YOU THINKING???
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
... which arrived in 1991. It packed a 2,048x2,048-pixel CCD and 8-bit storage. Nice resolution. But really limited storage, even a tape deck would be better.Carbon based humanoid in training.
I put together a "slide" show recently of my son's life for a family event. We had few, grainy pictures from his younger days, and lots of high quality pics from more recent times. (Didn't have enough time to scan film photos.) It's like the Calvin and Hobbes where Calvin's dad claimed the world was black and white when he was younger, then got grainy color and then finally high quality color around the time Calvin was born.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
It's pretty fuckin lame for Kodak to be taking credit for the digital camera. For the entirety of the space race, we have been using digital photography. The Mariner and Voyager probes, for example, had some excellent digital cameras - they weren't exactly sending negatives back to an Earth-based lab! Voyager cameras were basically 60's technology, but some Voyager pictures of the gas planets and their moons have still not been surpassed.
About 18-20 years ago I was pesent for a demo of an analog camera. The CCD was read out as an analogue signal (as is usual now) and stored in ANALOGUE form on the removable 3" (not 3.5") disk (one of the silver ones like Amstrad used). I can't remember the resolution but the colour appeared fine. There was even a small colour printer (that worked well). It all worked beautifully. I don't remember the resolution but the quality was quite acceptable. It was a little bit larger than an SLR but not much. The only drawback I remember was that you could only store a very small number of images on the disk. Maybe as few as one.
My first digital camera was a Casio one with resolution 320x240 (back in 1997). It was an era still film cameras are mainstream. However, it was fairly bad camera in all measures.
Which then followed by an Olympus 1.3 MP camera in 2000. Which was really good, a quantum leap compared to my previous one.
Then I got my next one in 2005, Canon Powershot 510 (4MP). It is a good one with lot of features. But I always get its lens covering shutter damaged.. too delicate and exposed to outside.
They haven't done their research. They say Hasselblad is coming out with a 39MP camera, which will be the most megapixels yet. Not by far: The Seitz 6x17 is 160 MP. Granted, it has a maximum shutter speed of 1 second with the full 160MP, but still... It's also huge. I am amused.
Quite some time back, I read an article on the NC2000, an early-ish DSLR that really had a big impact on wire services and newspapers. It's very entertaining and amusing to read the travails of photographers working with this camera, including early experiences with color balance, anti-alias filters, or undesirable infrared sensitivity. Well worth a read:
http://www.robgalbraith.com/bins/multi_page.asp?cid=7-6463-7191