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Kodak’s First Digital Moment

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

mendax writes:

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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Original Submission

• Re:Rewards for contributions to the bottom line. (Score: 3, Informative) by hemocyanin on Thursday August 13 2015, @04:48PM

  by hemocyanin (186) on Thursday August 13 2015, @04:48PM (#222390) Journal

  A little more context from TFA reveals the value of management:

  In 1989, Mr. Sasson and a colleague, Robert Hills, created the first modern digital single-lens reflex (S.L.R.) camera that looks and functions like today’s professional models. It had a 1.2 megapixel sensor, and used image compression and memory cards.

  But Kodak’s marketing department was not interested in it. Mr. Sasson was told they could sell the camera, but wouldn’t — because it would eat away at the company’s film sales.

  “When we built that camera, the argument was over,” Mr. Sasson said. “It was just a matter of time, and yet Kodak didn’t really embrace any of it. That camera never saw the light of day.”

  Still, until it expired in the United States in 2007, the digital camera patent helped earn billions for Kodak, since it — not Mr. Sasson — owned it, making most digital camera manufacturers pay Kodak for the use of the technology. Though Kodak did eventually market both professional and consumer cameras, it did not fully embrace digital photography until it was too late.

  “Every digital camera that was sold took away from a film camera and we knew how much money we made on film,” Mr. Sasson said. “That was the argument. Of course, the problem is pretty soon you won’t be able to sell film — and that was my position.”

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