The digital camera was invented longer than the Internet and Notebook computer.
Written on 4:00 PM by FreshelStar
Kodak's digital photography pioneer looks at the past, the present and the future
Story by Sasiwimon Boonruang
Did you know that the digital camera was invented over 30 years ago and has been existence longer than the Internet, the notebook computer and even the PC?
The world's first digital camera was invented in December1975 by Steve Sasson of the Eastman Kodak Company, although it was not for commercial purposes.
Sasson worked throughout the 1970s as a contributor at Kodak's research laboratories where he was engaged in a number of early digital imaging projects, one of them being the design and construction of the first digital still camera.
The inventor, who was in Bangkok recently, said that it had taken him a year to create a camera that weighed four kilograms. The device took pictures at 0.01 megapixels and captured the image from the new type of electronic sensor called a CCD (charge-coupled device) and stored it in 49,000 bits of memory.
"The picture from the camera was displayed on a black and white television and was recorded on a cassette tape, and it was read off into a frame store because at that time there was no PC," he said.
As a pioneer in photography, Kodak has been awarded more than 1,000 digital imaging patents and today almost all digital cameras rely on these competences.
Kodak has patents to the first digital camera, and later developed the techniques to capture colour images with CCD array, and this is the technology still used today, Sasson said.
So why was Kodak a late-comer in the digital camera market, having just launched mass market digital cameras in 2001?
Sasson said …click here...
