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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 13 2015, @04:52PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 13 2015, @04:52PM (#222393)

    The CCD was invented at Bell Labs by Willard Boyle and George Smith in 1969. The even won a prize [ieee.org] for their efforts. And either they patented the imaging aspect of it, or Michael Tompsett [ieee.org] at Bell Labs did.

    Before they were using CCDs on spacecraft, they were using electronic imagers that used vidicon tubes.