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

Typical.

[w0mprat]

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.

Re:Typical.

[WrongSizeGlass]

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.

This is a load of crap. It is the lack of vision of supervisors and management that keep these type of "engineering exercises" from making it out of the lab. The day we limit ourselves to the "how it works" people for "everything that can be done with it" is the day we stop innovating. Sometimes things start in the lab and creep out into the marketplace and other times ideas grow in the mind of individuals and they ask the people in the lab to "make it happen". You don't always need to "see the future" to be able to create it.

Re:Typical.

[dangitman]

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?"

What they should have been asking is "Is it possible to take photos of cats with this camera and superimpose poorly spelled captions over them?"

Re:Typical.

[dangitman]

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?"

What a load of myopic bullshit. Do you not realize there have always been narrow-minded bureaucrats within businesses? And that there also have, and will continue to be visionary innovators and gutsy start-ups?

Re:Typical.

[nusuth]

The problem is neither vision nor ergonomics. Unless you have energy efficient, cheap and fast memory, processors and ccd, digital photography cannot be done at consumer level regardless of how you package it. Availability of affordable computer to transfer, store and manipulate those photographs is also important (although not as critical as availability of cam components.) None of these can be developed and produced with a single vision of producing a digital camera (except perhaps cheap ccd) because there is not enough volume. These technologies must become available for larger aplications and then adapted for digital cameras. Digital photography arrived when it arrived becuase that is when electronics and computer technology made it viable.

Re:Typical.

[Ephemeriis]

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.

Except that neither industrial design nor packaging would have helped Kodak sell this film-less camera.

The problem with this film-less approach, in 1975, was largely one of infrastructure. Just look at the questions:

Why would anyone ever want to view his or her pictures on a TV? Given the technology of the time, it's a valid question. Folks didn't have home computers. TVs were low-resolution. Hell, not even everyone had a TV. Why would you go through the process of lugging around a giant camera and waiting several seconds for it to write to tape just to view a picture on a TV? Why not take a normal picture, get it developed normally, and look at a crisp photo like normal?

How would you store these images? Again, nobody had computers. You couldn't write these tapes to your HDD. You couldn't upload them to a server or burn them to CD. You'd be storing a box of tapes. Why do that when you could just store photos instead?

What does an electronic photo album look like? The answer, of course, is Flickr, but that didn't exist at the time. What would an electronic photo album look like without a computer? It'd have to be another piece of hardware attached to a TV in all likelihood.

The problem wasn't vision... It wasn't packaging... It wasn't marketing... The problem was a lack of digital infrastructure to support electronic photography. The world, at the time, was still essentially analog. Yes, computers existed. Yes, networks existed. But you didn't have the kind of ubiquity that we do today. Today absolutely everything has a fairly high resolution display on it. Today pretty much everything has Internet access. Today you can view those film-less photos on almost anything you want, or print them out easier than you can get a real photo developed. Back in 1975 that just wasn't true.

Re:Typical.

[dzfoo]

Not quite. If you read the original blog entry from Mr. Sasson, you'll realize that they themselves had no idea of any real world application of the device. They built it because they thought it was a nifty technological problem to solve, without any clear direction as to how it would apply in the real world.

Those questions asked by the audience after the demo are as relevant today as they were back then:

• Why would anyone ever want to view his or her pictures on a TV? Indeed. If you consider how digital photography has captured the mass consumer market you'll see that there are many factors that contributed to this adoption: the ability to share photos, to keep and view them on very personalized portable devices, e-mail, web blogs, JPEG, the Internet, personal computers, etc. Many of these could not have even been conceived back in 1975, but none of them include just merely passively watching a photograph on a TV screen.
• How would you store these images? It must be an efficient, stable and non-volatile mechanism; one that at least outlasts photo paper and costs at most as much, otherwise there is absolutely no advantage to the consumer. Did any such affordable mechanisms exist during 1975? Perhaps, but we can know for sure that personal computers as we know them now, did not; so there wasn't a readily available storage medium of which consumers could take advantage.
• What does an electronic photo album look like? We know now, of course, but it wasn't even obvious during the advent of the first set of consumer digital cameras how to best store, display, and enjoy and share a digital photo collection; apart from the then typical hierarchical file/folder storage system.
• When would this type of approach be available to the consumer? As Mr. Sasson suggested to his audience in 1975, ignoring all practical and philosophical questions above, and considering this purely as a technological problem; Moore's law predicts it would have been 15 to 20 years. That would have put the device on consumers' hands in the early- to mid-1990s. As it turned out, that was overly optimistic--but not by much! Now, take into consideration that personal computers--the primary storage and central point of digital photography collections--did not become massively popular until sometime in the 1990s and it should be obvious why it may have taken a few years more for the idea to truly catch on.

The real lesson of this story is that novel ideas and interesting inventions cannot amount to much without an actual real-world application that solves a real problem, addresses a real need, or enhances a real existing application. Additionally, we can learn that sometimes these interesting but otherwise useless (in practical terms) inventions can indeed achieve popularity and become useful--or even necessary--by previously unforeseen factors aligning serendipitously to provide the perfect mix of technology, application, and demand for them to evolve and flourish to fill that need.

Mr. Sasson says that, back in 1975, they had no idea what a portable, all-digital, film-less photo camera could amount to, nor how or why it would be used. Yet they were intuitively impressed that it would necessarily change things. And in that they were presciently correct.

          -dZ.

Re:Typical.

[tverbeek]

The exposure would have been pretty much instantaneous, even with the limitations of 1975 analog-to-digital conversion technology. The 23 seconds was to write that data to a cassette, which required rather low bandwidth read/write.

Re:Typical.

[tverbeek]

I was around in 1975. I remember the technology that existed and understand what it was capable of. And, Senator, it was not ready for this rather brilliant idea.

In fact, the questions posed by the Kodak suits continued to plague digital photography for another quarter century. Despite my interest in both photography and computers, I didn't buy a digital camera until around 2000 because the technology just wasn't good enough yet (at least not an affordable price). In 1975 working on digital photography was a bit like Leonardo working on manned flight in 1500. It wasn't anyone's "lack of vision" that kept the pilgrims from coming to North America on an airplane instead of the Mayflower; it was the state of the technological arts.

Re:Typical.

[CronoCloud]

The concept of funny captioned cat pictures is a bit over 100 years old at least:

http://icanhascheezburger.com/2008/12/01/funny-pictures-oldest-ever-lolcat-found/

Re:Typical.

[jedidiah]

> If it took 23 seconds for it to record something, it's more of a glorified scanner than an actual camera.

No. That just makes it a very old school camera.

This is what happens when you have neither a vision for tomorrow or a solid grasp of the past.

This tech demo wasn't so much an indication of what was going into production soon but what the future would look like as soon as the tech caught up. This should have been used by management to drive long term strategic direction of the company in terms of decades.

They saw what was coming and had plenty of time to prepare for it.

Kodak: credit where credit is due

[penguinchris]

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.

Re:Kodak: credit where credit is due

[WrongSizeGlass]

Kodak will forever be remembered as the 'Xerox' of digital photography. They had it, they had it first and they shelved it. They would have had all the early patents on digital photography, image formats, etc. They could have changed the game, but instead they clung to their entrenched mindset.

Re:Kodak: credit where credit is due

[dmesg0]

They didn't really shelve it, they continued to invest in the development of the digital photography and made many achievements. They improved the CCDs a lot, built the digital part of the first professional SLRs (using bodies from Nikon and later Canon). However they were unable to keep the pace and were soon surpassed by the Japanese companies

Ironically Kodak contributed a lot to the technology that in the end made their traditional business obsolete.

Re:Kodak: credit where credit is due

[jedrek]

Kodak makes a ton of sensor for other camera companies, including some of the best, high-end medium format sensors in the game. None of the film manufacturers has done as well in the digital arena: Agfa, Konica, etc. Fuji's doing pretty well, but then they make fine lenses for medium (hasselblad uses them) and large format.

Re:Kodak: credit where credit is due

[CmdrChaos]

Kodak is a perfect example of the way the patent system should work. They realized a long time ago they didn't have to make things. They just had to invent the technology. Fuji film was made under a Kodak patent. They have patents on lens technology as well as digital tech. The chances are every time you bye a camera Kodak makes a little bit of money.

Re:Kodak: credit where credit is due

[drinkypoo]

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.

WHAT cheap digital cameras that are fairly decent? I owned one Kodak digital camera (not a particularly cheap one, either) and the interface was so bad and so slow that I decided never to give them any of my money again. I've bought four digitals since and didn't even THINK of reading the reviews for the Kodaks, let alone purchasing one.

Good question

[JorDan Clock]

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.

Link to the orginal article

[houghi]

http://pluggedin.kodak.com/post/?id=687843
The date there is October 16, 2007

News? Hardly.

Re:Link to the orginal article

[WrongSizeGlass]

We would have got it sooner if someone in Kodak management had 'green-lighted' the posting of it rather than waiting for someone else to reinvent the approval ;-)

Re:Link to the orginal article

[dangitman]

The date there is October 16, 2007

Well, at least slashdot's 3 years beats the 32 years it took Kodak to post the article on their website!

Re:Link to the orginal article

[snsh]

One oddity of film photography was that people would shoot Christmas, New Years, and then the following Christmas on the same roll of film, and then suddenly want the film developed in under 1 hour.

And 12 years later, the movie version

[Two99Point80]

Looks like this project was the inspiration for the PXL-2000...

A piece of history

[Psychotria]

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.

Re:A piece of history

[Duncan J Murray]

Well I'm one of those 'still clinging onto that idea'.

I'll take your example - can you show me an artistic photograph that uses this photo-stacking technique? As a keen photographer myself, I do not see the point of it - it would require using a tripod in order that the images are perfectly aligned, if that is the case, then a long shutter speed combined with a small aperture would achieve the same, and without any artefacts due to the slight changes in focal length seen in many lenses when refocused.

I think the public perception of film is stunted by the cheap ways film used to be dealt with in your local processing lab - processed in a non-dust free environment, and scanned by poor quality machines with poor quality operators. In actual fact 'flim' itself has a tremendous capacity to capture information, and if one is willing to take a small amount of effort to maximise information obtained from the film, one would find very high resolution (35mm captures around the equivalent of a 24mp dslr - see link below), excellent dynamic range, which has a curved shoulder allow colours to fade smoothly into white when overexposued, tonality (see the 7D versus fuji velvia - it's not just the resolution, but also the colour accuracy and colour resolution).

http://photo.net/film-and-processing-forum/00WErk?start=200

This article looks more at the non-resolution aspects of film:

http://www.twinlenslife.com/2009/05/digital-vs-film-real-deal-nikon-d300-vs.html

And Ken Rockwell, as much as he says things clearly thinking it through, has an excellent article with many more valid points here:

http://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/why-we-love-film.htm

Now please do not reply with one of the comparisons which confirmed in a large number of peoples minds that digital was superior, without 1st quoting what scanner was used to do the comparison, and if it isn't a drum scanner, you are already standing on shaky ground.

Duncan.

P.S. Of course buying a Nikon D3X is more convenient and probably cheaper than using a 35mm film camera and sending your photos off for drum scanning, but that is not what we're discussing. I have no problem with people stating that digital is cheaper and more convenient with quality nearly up there with film.

Not necessarily

[Sycraft-fu]

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.

Re:Not necessarily

[michaelmalak]

There is a lot of things that need to come together to make a technology viable.

Yes, and you made my first of two points, so I'm just replying to your post, and will make my second point of why 1975 was not the right time for digital cameras:

In 1975, we were still living in the era of scarcity. If you read Little House on the Prairie, you see what we would now consider abject poverty that they had in the nineteenth century -- hand-held slates because paper was too expensive; Ma's "china shepherdess", her sole knick-knack, that she carted around whenever they moved, children going barefoot so as to not wear out their Sunday shoes, etc.

Post-WWII was the first watershed era of abundance, with home appliances, indoor climate control, television, and homes doubling in size from cabins, shacks, and Craftsman bungalows. But still, although there was television, as we are reminded by BTTF, people only had one television. Why would you monopolize the one family television to show photos? Even into the 1980's, again from BTTF, Marty McFly attested to having only two televisions. (Although I am old enough for such personal recollections, I city BTTF merely for more authority than personal anecdotes.)

The second watershed was the influx of Chinese imports from Wal-Mart, really starting around in earnest around 2002 (especially compared to the double-digit increases in housing, education, and healthcare). It was weird to me that stuff was so inexpensive that it became more economic to dispose and replace rather than to preserve and repair items for years. People started buying so, so much stuff, that it became trendy to "live simply" and to "declutter". Enter the digital camera. The digital camera allowed one to clear out those shoeboxes and bulky "albums" of photos and to "de-clutter". People not only had five TVs, they had five computers on which to display photos.

Even though the 1975 lifestyle is recognizable to today's eyes (in contrast to, say, nineteenth century living), everything was still expensive, every purchased item was kept for years and treasured, and the idea of decluttering was not on anyone's radar. In this context, given the high resolution, great color rendition, usability in direct sunlight, and portability of prints, why would anyone want to forgo watching (and prevent the rest of the family from watching) All in the Family to see a photo?

Re:Not necessarily

[maxume]

Authoritative fiction!

Re:Not necessarily

[Fulminata]

Yeah, pretty much. I lived through the 70s and 80s, and the disposable culture was already well established. Well, in the case of the 70s, that was probably the decade that it became established, but by 75 the change was well underway.

The average household in 1975 probably did just have one television, but that was one of the last years for which that was true, and households that were "early adopters" probably already had at least a second television in the master bedroom.

By the end of the decade I had a television in my bedroom, albeit a small black and white one at first, and that was as a child in a lower middle class household. My parents did not have one in their bedroom, but then they monopolized the main TV and were far from being "early adopters."

The popularity of instant cameras during this period shows that if a practical digital camera had been available, it probably would have achieved wide acceptance.

Point being that society would have been ready for a digital camera in 1975, if the state of technology had been ready to provide one. It wasn't.

Ham Radio SSTV (Slow Scan TV)

[shoppa]

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.

Re:They should have released it right there and th

[Isaac-1]

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).

Re:Digital has been around for awhile.

[confused one]

Even the summary makes it clear that the Kodak prototype preceded your experience by 14 years.

Re:A giant with clay legs

[tomhath]

but they made a terrible business decision not to expand their traditional offerings, thinking film would last forever

No, they saw digital coming, and they tried to get on board. The problem they faced was that every camera manufacturer saw the same thing and all were rushing to bring digital cameras to the market. Kodak was never really a camera company, their main business was film and chemicals; they knew there was nothing they could do to stop that business line from shrinking as digital cameras became available to the masses. Kodak has a share of the digital camera market but they have to compete with companies known to consumers as camera manufacturers such as Canon and Nikon.

Why Kodak failed

[snsh]

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.

Re:A giant with clay legs

[airfoobar]

TechDirt's Mike Masnick did a wonderful job explaining why you are wrong: http://www.techdirt.com/blog/entrepreneurs/articles/20100808/00561810539.shtml

They did way too little, way too late. They had a very powerful brand, but they failed to reinvent themselves in the consumers' eyes because they didn't see digital as a big enough threat to their existing business.

Re:Hey, at least they asked good questions

[multipartmixed]

Yes. Before I had a CD burner or a DVD player, I did that regularly. My old Kodak 2 megapixel camera could actually do a slideshow.

Re:Digital has been around for awhile.

[tverbeek]

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.

Yea but interesting

[Ilgaz]

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.

Re:Hey, at least they asked good questions

[mobby_6kl]

I still do that whenever I'm traveling - it's pretty nice to be able to show my grandparents I took over the day on their large-ish TV rather than my 12" Thinkpad or the camera screen. They do have a DVD player nowadays, but still why bother with burning the photos to the DVD unless I want them to keep it? The video-out on my Panasonic works very well for a slideshow.

Re:Digital has been around for awhile.

[tverbeek]

Here's a detail of the above-linked image.

Why not mention Apple?

[Ilgaz]

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.

That's not an old black and white TV

[Skapare]

That's an old COLOR TV (Sony Trinitron) being fed with a black and white image.

Re:Digital has been around for awhile.

[tverbeek]

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.

Re:First post.

[Captain Splendid]

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.