History Of Digital Photography - A Snapshot Over Time

Where does the history of digital photography really start? Looking at various historical overviews, it quickly becomes clear that the starting point depends quite a bit on your point of view...

Digital cameras use image sensors instead of film to sample light. They do this thanks to the photoelectric effect in which some metals release electrons when exposed to light.

You could probably argue that Albert Einstein - who won the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the photoelectric effect - got the ball rolling in the history of digital photography!

Often incorporated into the history of digital photography, is the camera designed by Texas Instruments Inc. in 1972. However, this camera was not digital, but an analog-based, film-less device.

The next step in the history of digital photography came in 1972, when Steven Sasson of Kodak was instructed by his supervisor to try and find a way to build a camera using solid-state image sensors. These chips use photosensitive diodes called photosites to record light.

An important marker in the history of digital photography was when Sasson snapped the first digital picture in December 1975. According to Sasson the image took 23 seconds to record onto the cassette, and then another 23 seconds to read off a playback unit onto a television.

However, no consumer camera was released at that stage by the company. Later, in 1986, Kodak invented the world's first megapixel sensor, capable of recording 1.4 million pixels that could produce a 5x7-inch digital photo-quality print.

You can probably safely say that the history of digital photography indicates that the first prototype digital camera was the Mavica (Magnetic Video Camera), released by Sony Corporation in the early 1980's. This was essentially an electronic video camera that produced still images which were recorded on two-inch floppy disks.

The Mavica used a charge-coupled device (CCD), and the origins of the CCD can be traced back to October 1969. This was when George Smith and Willard Boyle, two of the role-players in the history of digital photography, invented the charge-coupled device at Bell Labs, where they were at the time attempting to create a new kind of semiconductor memory for computers.

The history of digital photography demonstrates that the CCD played quite a central role in the development of the digital camera. This technology is today also used in broadcasting, and in video applications that range from security monitoring to high-definition television. Facsimile machines, copying machines, image scanners, and bar code readers also make use of CCDs to turn light into useful information.

After the Mavica, it was only in 1994 that Apple introduced the first digital camera for consumers, another milestone in the history of digital photography.

The QuickTake 100 (this camera was co-developed with Kodak) worked with a home computer via a serial cable and featured a 640 x 480 pixel CCD. It could produce eight images stored in internal memory, and also featured a built-in flash.

Because of constraints around the size of the processor the QuickTake 100 looked more like a set of binoculars, but this soon changed. As the history of digital photography will show, modern digital cameras soon took on the familiar shape of film cameras.

All this technology was developed in little more than thirty years. Just imagine how the next few decades will shape subsequent installments of the history of digital photography!

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