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posted by cmn32480 on Thursday August 13 2015, @04:56AM   Printer-friendly
from the say-cheese dept.

The New York Times published a story about a young Kodak engineer's development of the first practical digital camera:

Imagine a world where photography is a slow process that is impossible to master without years of study or apprenticeship. A world without iPhones or Instagram, where one company reigned supreme. Such a world existed in 1973, when Steven Sasson, a young engineer, went to work for Eastman Kodak.

Two years later he invented digital photography and made the first digital camera.

Mr. Sasson, all of 24 years old, invented the process that allows us to make photos with our phones, send images around the world in seconds and share them with millions of people. The same process completely disrupted the industry that was dominated by his Rochester employer and set off a decade of complaints by professional photographers fretting over the ruination of their profession.

The camera he created looked rather odd (there is a picture in the article):

The final result was a Rube Goldberg device with a lens scavenged from a used Super-8 movie camera; a portable digital cassette recorder; 16 nickel cadmium batteries; an analog/digital converter; and several dozen circuits — all wired together on half a dozen circuit boards.

The article points out that Kodak owned the patent for the digital camera and made a fortune from it until it expired in 2007. Three years later Kodak itself expired, filing bankruptcy because it failed to properly utilize the technology it invented.

It may be an error to say that Mr. Sasson invented digital photography. Wasn't NASA doing it with its Mariner and Pioneer space probes?


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by mcgrew on Thursday August 13 2015, @01:29PM

    by mcgrew (701) <publish@mcgrewbooks.com> on Thursday August 13 2015, @01:29PM (#222268) Homepage Journal

    Indeed; that statement was obviously written by someone young enough to have never experienced analog photography. Kodak came into existence in 1888, which is when it stopped being a process that "is impossible to master without years of study or apprenticeship." Everyone had cameras when I was a kid. It was, however, a slow process. Faster for me, since I learned how to develop film when I was about 12 but it still took an hour to develop the film, project the negatives onto print paper, and hours for the paper to dry.

    And as you said, just because you can point a camera and take a picture doesn't make you a photographer. A photographer has to know composition, perspective, and all the other things any visual artist needs to know.

    I wrote about photography in the introduction to Yesterday's Tomorrows (that part of the foreword I took from an article I wrote a couple of years ago). It deals with changes in technology that no one ever foresaw or could ever foresee, like the smartphone. A snippet:

    When I was five, a camera, even a small one, was a bulky thing that usually sat in a closet or drawer until a vacation or a birthday party or some other special occasion came along. You would go to the drugstore, buy a few rolls of film, photograph what you wanted, send the film to be developed, and the photos would come back a week later.

    This marvelous device will take a decent picture without film, instantly viewable in color, and can be immediately sent to anyone in the entire world.

    Here is the forword [mcgrewbooks.com] (actually, the whole book)

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    mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
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