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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."
I think you need to re-read his proposal. He said a 4 pixel sensor with a DLP chip *in between*. The incoming light would be reflected off of the DLP onto the 4 pixel scanner, much like running a DLP television in reverse.
As another poster said, it probably doesn't scale well. But it would be better than a banana.
-- Andyvan
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" ?
Big corporations don't like risk, and changing the game means risk. Even though they owned key patents, triggering the expansion of digital would risk creating sleek newcomers that would eat into Kodak's market share.
I would compare it to IBM's decision to make their PC have a mostly open architecture. Yes, they held the market for a few years, but it triggered a revolution that was faster than them. (They had already failed with a closed-architecture micro in the late 70's, which is why they took the risk.)
In short, Kodak's decision was not entirely irrational. They knew that big companies cannot change as fast as startups. Perhaps what they really were doing was delaying the inevitable and they chose what they thought was the slowest path to death by not helping along the technology that was to eventually eat them.
Table-ized A.I.
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.
On the fly increasing of the ISO increases the noise of your pictures. As noise is what limits the low end of the range of CCDs, this means we would have to improve the dynamic range of the CCDs.
The worlds first digital photo
http://www.gizmag.com/go/4717/gallery/