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.'"

Comments

Nostalgic?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Nostalgic?

[fyngyrz]

Too late. It's already happened. Same location on chip, so the same sensor size, essentially three sensors at three different depths. Sigma SD14, for instance. Price is right in the prosumer zone.

Reverse DLP

[inKubus]

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.

Re:Reverse DLP

[wickerprints]

The problem with using a "reverse DLP" mechanism for light capture is that it's just not possible to scan several millions of pixels at higher shutter speeds. The method neither scales well with resolution nor time, unlike existing CMOS/CCD technologies which does scale very well with time, and reasonably well with resolution. Even worse, there is a more fundamental problem--the incoming photons through the aperture enter at different angles and energies. How do you properly distinguish them with a sufficiently precise moving object, when the camera is handheld? Eventually, one reaches a limit where the ability to trigger a sensing element falls below the noise threshold. Simply increasing the sensor size does not completely resolve this issue, although it does mitigate the need for extremely sensitive pixels. I forsee the short-term future of digital light capture to go in the direction of improvements in sensor design and optics, perhaps even implementing layered sensors (higher frequency photons penetrate more layers, thereby resulting in better frequency capture), rather than the commonly-used Bayer filters that invariably result in information loss. Long-term, I see things like capturing phase information, leading to natural light, full-color holography, thereby rendering photography obsolete.

first picture?

[jmcnaught]

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.

Re:first picture?

[matfud]

One of the first (and still the most commonly used image in image processing) is actaully porn

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenna

matfud

nothing can stop it

[User 956]

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.

vision

[William Robinson]

The resolution was a revolutionary .01 megapixels and it took 23 seconds to record the first digital photograph. Talk about shutter lag.

Thankfully, Steven Sasson did not feel that nobody will ever need more that 0.01 megapixels:)

Let CNet fix that for you

[Strange Ranger]

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.