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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?'"
As with most engineering exercises, if your not intrigued by the novel and clever and application of new technology, there's little value to be seen by non-technical types. Hence observations such as the summary mentions 'Why would anyone ever want to view his or her pictures on a TV?" - more from TFA: " How would you store these images? What does an electronic photo album look like? When would this type of approach be available to the consumer?" - the engineers at Kodak didn't consider any real world application.
What we can learn from this is there's a lot of technology we've have had sooner if industrial design and packaging was a priority, rather than just getting something working for a cool demo, and assuming observers would understand the potential.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
Kodak's image these days is fairly poor; although their digital cameras are pretty popular in the cheap category they're basically non-existent in the professional arena.
Which is too bad, because they did a lot of things to advance photography over the years, not least of which was introducing it to "the masses". I guess now that I think about it, that's what they're still trying to do now with their cheap digital cameras that are fairly decent. But of course they used to contribute much to professionals as well, especially good quality film. They never really had high-end cameras that were used professionally, it was really all about the film, so the switch to digital hit them hard.
My uncle worked as head of a research division at Kodak for many years, and still lives in Rochester. I attended the University of Rochester, which back when George Eastman was around got quite a lot of Kodak money and wouldn't be the school it is today without it. So I've had a lot of exposure to Kodak over the years. I've heard of this digital camera before, and other interesting things they've done.
If you're in the area it's definitely worth checking out the George Eastman House museum. It's his rather incredible mansion, turned into a photography museum. I don't remember if I heard about this camera there; possibly not but they do have all kinds of old equipment on display. They also have an attached movie theater, which shows a different classic, art-house, etc. film every single night. I don't live there any more, but as a student I went to their classic film showings all the time. Always on 35mm and great prints. There's a school for film preservation there, and a huge collection of films.
Why would anyone ever want to view his or her pictures on a TV?
Because non-moving images on a TV scare people. That's why the History Channel does that Ken Burns thingy whenever they show a bunch of old pictures narrated by someone with a dull, droning voice. No one would watch it if the picture just sat there, staring back at you like some kind of demon box.
http://pluggedin.kodak.com/post/?id=687843
The date there is October 16, 2007
News? Hardly.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Looks like this project was the inspiration for the PXL-2000...
I'm not sure why this is only just being presented on Slashdot because it's a very old article. Nevertheless it's an important part of history. It marks one of the first points where photography began to move away from chemical reactions on emulsions to light being recorded digitally. For many years of course digital photography was regarded as inferior to images captured on film and some still cling onto that idea. But I am in the group that believes that that idea is no longer true. Digital photography has opened up whole new avenues of expression and allows a range of techniques that would have been impossible or prohibitively impractical using film. An example, I guess, would include focus stacking where a number of photos with a slightly different focal plane are combined into a single image with increased depth of field. Digital photography has, in my opinion, opened up new areas for creative exploration that were not possible with film. So, yeah, the article refers to an important piece of history.
The interesting thing is that despite the various examples present in history, just as many companies, if not more, still cling to the entrenched mindset instead of attempting to innovate. Heck, look at Blockbuster, now filing for bankruptcy. My theory is that once people have a lot of money, they're afraid to experiment with it, even if that will bring in more money. So instead they cling to old ways of thinking and ultimately lose in the long run. Engineering types aren't exactly striking gold with their annual salaries, so they're not necessarily encumbered with worrying about the "financial implications" of design innovations or market shifts. I think some companies try to remedy this problem by bringing on engineers to be a part of the corporate structure, but often times the culture and mindset clash is just too great and it fails to work out. Look at Microsoft's recent firing of J. Allard and their nixing of the Courier.
There is a lot of things that need to come together to make a technology viable. It isn't a case of "Oh had it just been packaged/marketed better it would have been around earlier!" Other technologies also have to develop to let something be cheap enough, usable enough, to support it, etc.
While this technology was cool as an engineering demo, the rest of the tech out there wasn't up to spec. It was huge and expensive, it never would have been practical to sell, regardless of marketing. Yes, as time went on the tech developed and got cheaper... And as it did we did indeed get digital cameras.
Also you have to look at supporting tech. Viewing a photo on a computer monitor, or maybe HDTV, works fine because they are quite high resolution. Viewing a photo on an NTSC TV, especially a 70s NTSC TV would have sucked. Photo paper was just too far superior. Without ubiquitous high rez displays, an all-digital imaging format is something hard to sell.
While sometimes all the stuff we need is already there for years and it takes a person to realize the potential and put it in to a package people will buy, other times developments happen before supporting tech is ready for it. You can see this countless times when something would be tried, with the best tech of the day, and just not really be a marketable device, despite how neat it is. Years later it is done again and sells well, because required technologies have advanced to the point you can do it now.
A camera not cobbled together from cannibalized parts would likely manage to save the image in less than 23 seconds, or transmit it over wire/radio to a remote printer. It wouldn't have been a pocket gadget for a mainstream tourist in 1975, but think of NASA/spies/hazardous environments and similar applications where you can not conveniently reload film and money is not an object. Or even mega rich. They can always somehow justify possessing a unique gadget no matter how useless it is.
I bought my first computer in 1980. Everybody then asked me why anybody would want a computer in their home. I bet that everybody who asked me then, owns more computers now than they realize.
I mean it, has anyone ever used those composite video cables that come with so many digital cameras to display a picture on a TV?
This sounds morally equivalent to ham radio SSTVin terms of speed (or lack of) and technique... and hams had been doing SSTV snce the 1960's.
Slashdot needs some perspective, more importantly needs people that remember 1975, this was 3 to 4 years before the first true home VCR's hit the market, and about 5 years before the first home color video cameras for those VCR's each with a price tag starting at over $1,000 and weighed in together at a weight that would earn an overweight penalty for modern airline luggage weight limits. Kodak cameras in this time period were being driven by a need to compete for what the masses wanted, namely small and instant, with little regard to quality, the 110 instamatic with its easy to load cartridge film was quickly becoming a household norm, and this was only a year before Kodak introduced its own doomed line of instant cameras (recalled after Kodak lost its lawsuit with Polaroid a few years later).
This isn't really news, but it's a great insight on why Kodak became as irrelevant as it is today. They were already inventing a lot of the technology for digital photography as early as the 70s, but they made a terrible business decision not to expand their traditional offerings, thinking film would last forever. They were very wrong, they failed to innovate and adapt fast enough to a changing market and within a couple of decades they were superseded by those who were prepared to embrace the new technology. C'est la vie, I s'pose.
Even the summary makes it clear that the Kodak prototype preceded your experience by 14 years.
When I was an intern working at Eastman Kodak a VP told us that at around 1980, Kodak had a billion dollars to invest in research and the choice was between digital imaging and instant photography. They chose instant photography.
By 1990 Kodak spent another billion dollars just on lawyers fighting Polaroid over patents.
'Why would anyone ever want to view his or her pictures on a TV?'
And yet they still tried selling those stupid PhotoCD players to people.
The real question is did they patent the concept and who are they going to sue?
A bit closer in time to the Kodak project was an exhibit/activity at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago in (I think) 1978. The subject sat in front of a video camera which fed its signal to a computer, which did an analog-to-digital conversion and produced a "portrait by computer": overprinting characters on a dot-matrix printer to produce the right tonal value for each (rather large) pixel. When I sat for it, this was the result. I was really into photography (darkroom in the basement, etc), and this helped spark my interest in computers; I started saving my nickels and bought an Atari 400 a couple years later.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
We already had "slow-scan tv recorders" back in 1972 in Popular Science magazine. You could record a single image on an audio tape cassette in about 20 seconds. And as you can see from the article, it's been around since 1960
Even the summary makes it clear that the Kodak prototype preceded your experience by 14 years.
That and (as the OP acknowledges, but slightly minimises the significance of) the fact that the Xapshot wasn't digital. I'm guessing that the Xapshot was comparable to the Mavica still video cameras (*) Sony produced during the mid-to-late 1980s (**) which effectively recorded a single frame of NTSC-resolution video to a single track of a floppy disc in fully analogue format. I assume that it would still have required some form of digitiser to get it into the Amiga, so while such cameras were an important step in the commercial development of digital photography, they were only half the equation.
I remember seeing a video digitiser for the Atari 8-bit computers circa 1986 which digitised still frames from a video source. Such a source could of course include an analogue video camera or camcorder (which became popular during the mid-80s). But even that combo was over 10 years after Kodak had created the first truly digital camera shown.
(*) Sony later marketed some truly digital cameras under the "Digital Mavica" name, but the original Mavicas were analogue.
(**) In fact, Sony demonstrated a Mavica camera circa *1981*, although it's not clear if this early model was ever actually sold commercially.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Slashdot isn't "digg". I didn't read about that story until today, I don't care whether it was written in 2007 or even 1997.
Story fits well to today where trendy idiots think Kodak is some patent trolling company who didn't invent anything. Perhaps, it may educate them a bit.
Funny that, one of their "failed" "old" devices format is still in use today, completely open and there is no way you will do anything without using that format in pro/movie.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cineon
It was some amazing technology for that time but was way too high end, only Hollywood could afford it. Its format, which was always open/documented is still in use today.
Here's a detail of the above-linked image.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Perhaps you know, Apple did one of the first digital cameras in days when they were really in bad shape (no SJobs).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_QuickTake
They got burned too. It was openly joked about. Kodak could have spent billion dollars but they had some amazing revenue to cover it. Apple didn't. It is more like MS, they don't bother whether XBox loses money or Silverlight is considered as a joke, they can always cover it. They (and Google) can always gamble.
Those guys did well to even think of the idea in 1975. At around the same time the film "The Man Who Fell To Earth" portrayed the future of photography as instant, but still using film. Even those whose job is new ideas have a hard time making the leap to a whole different technology to solve an apparently solved problem in a completely new way.
When the team of technicians presented the camera to Kodak audiences they of course heard a barrage of curious questions:
Why would anyone ever want to view his or her pictures on a TV? How would you store these images? What does an electronic photo album look like? When would this type of approach be available to the consumer?
That's the problem with huge companies, people try to look smart by knocking down an idea, or only see a finished product, instead of acknowledging the great hack!
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
Ah, the Kodak Land Camera. We had one of those. I remember my dad receiving a check as part of Kodak's settlement with it's customers following the loss of the suit with Polaroid. I also remember hoarding the film to the point that it went bad and the last few pictures we took with it didn't turn out well.
That's an old COLOR TV (Sony Trinitron) being fed with a black and white image.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
doh. digital cameras would have bombed in 1975... And for 20 years after . Go look up the word ' market '. jesus , geeks are so narrow..
Deleted
indeed i was very annoyed when i had to get a camera on a phone some years back. and then over time use phone camera so much more have upgraded phones for the better camera!
Kodak CLEARLY missed the logical answer to "Why would anyone want to...?" "Because it's cool!" and it's cousin "Because I can!" Talk about lack of vision! Pam http://www.thatgirlblogs.com/
Even the summary makes it clear that the Kodak prototype preceded your experience by 14 years.
I wasn't contradicting the article, I'm just saying it's not a one-shot anomaly that happened in the 70's and then resurfaced years later.
I'd think you'd be able to actually read to catch that, rather than just um, accuse me of not reading. *rolls eyes*
Slyvania's 1968 "Color Slide Theater" built a color flying-spot scanner and Kodak Carousel slide changer into a $995 color TV console.
You could record and synchronize a slide show with the built in audio cassette recorder.
It eliminated the projection screen and hot, high-intensity, projection lamp.
Just as suggestively, it introduced the notion of instant - responsive - manual or semi-automatic adjustment of hue, brightness and contrast, a kind of on-the-fly photo editing that never been possible outside the photo lab.
Now - See Your Slides on This New Color TV
Cell phones became practical more than just "a few years ago". I'm one of the latecomers to the cellphone party (I dislike phones in general, phones that follow you even less), and I've had one (out of necessity) since 2003.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
The patent would have expired by now. The terms are still too long, and patent law has a host of other problems, but at least patents still expire.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
I still ask the question in the last sentence today.
Answer: Our tenth anniversary. Hundreds of pictures from throughout the years on slideshow on my large flatscreen as guests drift in and out of the living room during the night.
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
I disagree. I definitely caught that point he thought he made.
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
In the mid '80s there was a person who posted in the digital photography section of Compuserve who said that he was their lead and only digital photography engineer. He said at that time that the concept was something Kodak didn't want to do since it threatened their silver film business.
Almost at the same time I read about a consumer prototype being built out of a new chip by a company called Dycam. After some finagling I got engineering prototype #2 (still have it). Dycam was eventually bought by Logitech. It could take two or three black and white images, about 340x280 pixels, and didn't do all that badly. My idea back then was to take pictures of properties we had for sale and post them on what was then the leading graphic online service, Prodigy. However, neither the liquidations folks nor Prodigy liked the idea (Prodigy thought 4 colors was sufficient for everyone), and there weren't enough cameras to equip hundreds of staff anyway, nor any quick means to transmit and put the stuff together. Nor would it probably have reached enough bidders. Five years later the web started.
That sort of assemblage was fairly 'obvious' even then, but obviousness never seems to deter US patents. So which features of this process did Kodak patent? If they did, wouldn't that patent now be worth more than Kodak?
...had a kit project to build a "digital" video camera. The "MOS sensor" that it used was, as I recall, essentially a DRAM with a transparent cover -- in fact, people were prying the lids off standard DRAM chips to use them as image sensors. (Decades later, I verified that you could detect bit-flips in an erased EPROM when you hit it with a red laser pointer. Forget high-ISO night photography; this was probably somewhere around ISO 0.5.)
You could then presumably build an interface to load the image into your Altair 8800 box, presented in the previous month's issue. At some point in the next few months, they even ran a project for a bit-mapped graphic display. Those were the glory days of Popular Electronics.
Cell phones didn't become practical for normal people until the mid to late nineties. That's pretty recent, considering cellphones existed, theoretically, some fifteen years earlier. In some parts of the country it was even later. Around here, cellphones were basically useless as recently as 2005, because you pretty much had to climb a TV antenna tower to get usable reception. I used to routinely hang up on anyone who tried to call me using a cellphone. The static on the "bad" phones in the Sprint commercials was nowhere near as bad as what I heard when cellphone users called. It's gotten a lot better in the last five years, and the meanwhile sound quality of land lines has declined considerably (Verizon has basically stopped maintaining them, probably because they want everyone to switch over to cellphone$), but you can still hear the difference: it's still harder to hear someone on a cell phone than on a regular phone.
I didn't start seeing *children* routinely carrying around cellphones until sometime in the last ten years.
FWIW, you weren't quite one of the last holdouts. I still know several people who refuse to have a cell phone. Come to think of it, I'm one of those people. One of my goals in life is to some day live in a house with *no* phones, but until then, I at least don't carry one of the blessed things around with me all the bleeding time. There's a phone at the office, so if the call is work-related, people can call me when I'm on duty. Friends and family can get off their duffs and actually stop by if they want to chat, or of course there's email.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
Keep in mind that Kodak was mainly a film (and film processing chemicals) company, though, not so much camera company. (Think like HP during the Carly era - almost every product they sold was to support sales of inkjet ink.)
Here's one sentence you posted:
Now, let's rephrase that into what a Kodak PHB would hear:
Now you see why Kodak was scared of digital?