Kodak's 1975 Digital Camera

pickens writes "The NY Times reports on a digital camera put together at Kodak's Elmgrove Plant labs in Rochester, NY during the winter of 1975 from a mishmash of lenses and computer parts and an old Super 8 movie camera that took 23 seconds to record a single digital image to its cassette deck and using a customized reader could display the image on an old black and white television. Called 'Film-less Photography,' it took a 'year of piecing together a bunch of new technology' to create the camera which ran off 'sixteen nickel cadmium batteries, a highly temperamental new type of CCD imaging area array, an a/d converter implementation stolen from a digital voltmeter.' When the team of technicians presented the camera to Kodak audiences they heard a barrage of curious questions including — 'Why would anyone ever want to view his or her pictures on a TV?'"

Comments

Re:Digital has been around for awhile.

[jonadab]

Digital photography has been around for a while, but it didn't really become *practical* until the last ten years, when cameras that ordinary mortals can afford got image sensors good enough to take a picture under normal lighting conditions that can be cropped a bit and still have enough resolution for print and enough color quality to be substitutable for a 35mm photo for everyday purposes. Being able to save on film by taking pictures that weren't actually usable, with a camera that cost as much as a year's supply of film, was of dubious utility.

By the same token, cellphones have been around rather longer than many people realize, but they weren't really *practical* until a few years ago when reception coverage finally reached the point where you could actually take the phone on a car trip and expect to be able to make a call if you stopped for some reason at some random place along the way. Being able to make a call from anywhere in the world as long as it's downtown Chicago didn't really offer any major advantages over a land line, even if you happened to live or work where there was coverage.