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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."
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.
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!
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.
(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.