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DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY This is the man who started the digital revolution in photography, and he's holding the world's first digital camera.
He is Steven Sasson - and when he invented the digital camera he worked for Kodak, once world leader in making film for cameras. He still works for Kodak, but the world has changed around the company which has had to embrace digital photography like everyone else. (Thanks to the British Journal of Photography for the information here, and to Kodak for the photograph.) It was in 1975 that Steve began playing with early CCDs, the newly invented sensor devices that could produce an image on a television screen. The resolution was about 100 by 100 pixels. Steve's ground-breaking question was: 'Can we combine this new CCD technology with a permanent electronic storage medium?' He chose a cassette tape as his storage device. This was because cassette recorders were robust, low-cost, reliable and removable. Just like film! The device he came up with is pictured above. It comprises a lens, the CCD, a board of memory chips and a cassette recorder. Taking the picture took just 50 milliseconds, and the information was instantaneously sent to the memory board. From there it was sent to the cassette tape recorder and recorded as digital bits. That took nearly half a minute. It took another 15 years for technology to advance enough to make digital cameras practical. Nowadays, of course, digital photography has virtually taken over from film photography. It's rather ironic that the filmless camera was born in an office at the world's leading film manufacturer. |
