CNet Tracks the History of the Digital Camera

Abby Donivosif writes "CNet has up an article about the history of the digital camera. It's fascinating to note how far the technology has come in such a short amount of time. 'The camera generally recognized as the first digital still snapper was a prototype developed by Eastman Kodak engineer Steven Sasson in 1975. He cobbled together some Motorola parts with a Kodak movie-camera lens and some newly invented Fairchild CCD electronic sensors. The resulting camera, pictured above on its first trip to Europe recently, was the size of a large toaster and weighed nearly 4kg. Black-and-white images were captured on a digital cassette tape, and viewing them required Sasson and his colleagues to develop a special screen.'"

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Re:

[omeomi]

I remember an article by Steve Ciarcia about how to make a camera with memory chip that wasn't actually designed to be a sensor, IIRC

I believe that would be the CMOS chip.

Micron DRAM chip

[IvyKing]

The camera used a DRAM chip from Micron - exposure to light would bleed off the charge on each of the bits - not a very linear sensor.

FWIW, Jerry Pournelle's column had started at least a couple of years before that article - Jerry and Steve were Byte's two leading columnists in the first half of the 1980's - they were in separate enough niches that there wasn't much in the way of competition between them. What caused Byte to go downhill was McGraw-Hill wanting it to be more like PC Magazine and less like

Re:

[fyngyrz]

Pournelle was definitely one of the specific reasons I let my subscription to Byte run out. I had never read so much wrongheaded nonsense in one place until I encountered his column. Eventually I began to feel that any organization that paid that man for his opinions (as opposed to his fiction, which I generally like, especially if Niven is around to make it *really* good) wasn't going to get any more of my money.

At least that crazy wacko in Kilobaud was fun to read. It was like a print version of Art B

Re:

[IvyKing]

At least that crazy wacko in Kilobaud was fun to read. It was like a print version of Art Bell.

Sounds like Wayne Green, who has had a reputation as a crazy wacko in print since the early 1960's. Funny you should bring that up, Byte started as an adjunct to Wayne's 73 magazine, but went to his wife as part of their divorce settlement. Wayne then started Kilobyte, which got renamed Kilobaud after McGraw Hill complained about trademarks.

Re:

[fyngyrz]

Yes, Wayne Green. Kilobaud published my first technical article. Long time ago. 1977, I think. Thereabouts.

Re:

[IvyKing]

My former boss's nephew married Wayne's daughter - his nephew made a comment that Wayne was a bit of a weird bird.

IIRC, one of Wayne's contributions to the microcomputer scene was getting the 'Kansas City' standard established for recording data on cassette tap. This allowed for ease of swapping data on tapes for the 2 to 4 year period when a large number of hobbyists were using cassette tape for storage and interchange (e.g. Tarbell had an S-100 card with four cassette interfaces in mid-1979).

FWIW, t

Re:

[fyngyrz]

I still have a couple SWTPC KC tape controllers, they both still work - I had kind of a old computer fest here a few years back, wrote 6809 [blackbeltsystems.com], z80 and 6800 emulations, gathered up all my old software and so forth. Was interesting. I was able to recover every tape I'd made; I thought the oxide would fall off, but no, they played back fine. I even read back a paper tape of BASIC; now that was a bit of a flashback. I keep the paper tape in a sealed can. It's some kind of oiled paper, holding up very well indeed

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:

[Detritus]

My father, who worked for a news wire service many years ago, said that after a while you learned how to read punched paper tape by eye. This was handy when you were writing a story, punching it to tape for later transmission, and needed to make a correction. You could back up the tape and use the delete key to erase text by overpunching it with all ones. Now you know why ASCII DEL is 0x7f. The world's first word processor?

Re:

[fyngyrz]

Sad to say, I can read Baudot by eye from paper tape. I can spot shifts in an instant. I can read ASCII too. And 8080, 6800, and 6809 hexadecimal binary representation. Sigh. It's been a long revolution for me.

Friend of mine used to whistle into his microphone (we're amateur radio operators, "hams") and make a baudot demodulator spit out a continuous stream of RY's. Freak. :-)

Re:

[Megane]

Jerry Pournelle was the last reason I was still reading Byte at the end.

In '87 or so, they had a "tax laws are changing, so get six years for $99" special offer. I didn't care about tax deductions, having only recently finished college, but it was still a damn good deal.

By the end of that six years it had turned into little more than a bunch of reviews for mostly PC-clone software and hardware. Essentially all of its geek origins had vanished. So I let it lapse. (It was a much easier decision than letting

Re:

[fimbulvetr]

The camera is easily worth that. I'd keep it in a case and give it to your grandchildren, it may make them bloody rich.

Re:

[fyngyrz]

I still have both the 320x240 and 640x480 Casio cameras; in fact, I have all my digital cameras. Must be twelve... maybe as many as fifteen of them. This is an area where up until recently, resale value just can't compete with technology. So everything got shelved and basically forgotten. Currently, I have a Canon EOS 40D, and that baby is fun !

Probably going to be stuck with Canon for a while too, lenses make the investment fairly specific. I just bought my first cadioptric lens, basically a reflector

Re:

[E-Lad]

Nice shot! If you're interested in planetary and lunar photography and high power terrestrial zoom, you might want to look at getting a 4 or 5 inch Maksutov-Cassegrain telescope with a T-ring adaptor for your Canon. Small and compact (as far as telephoto work is concerned). I've seen a few people use the 120mm Mak telescope and mount from Orion (telescope.com) for this.

Re:

[fyngyrz]

I am interested, as a matter of fact. Have any model numbers?

Nostalgic?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, I recall the days of 320x240 and 640x480. Great times I'm sure.

As a digital photographer, I've come to appreciate the people behind the physical camera. Both technological and artistic.

As for future cameras, I think we'll see initially, 3x sensors allowing for on the fly HDR images. After that we'll go to static video where a framed shot can be spun around to see all the out of frame info.

After that, I suppose we'll get selective depth of field, on the fly image editing, blemish correction and on the fly multi-image splicing allowing for a static family photo to be created via sliced video.

Of course we'll have meta data including temperature, GPS, wind speed, angle, height, surrounding buildings, photographer's personal ID#, satellite upload, etc.

Film will die in the same way that pinhole cameras are dead. Sure, it's around and you can use it but what's the point? The medium isn't the art. It's the person behind the camera.

Let CNet fix that for you

[Strange Ranger]

Yes, I recall the days of 320x240 and 640x480. Great times I'm sure.

NEXT-->

As a digital photographer, I've come to appreciate the people behind the physical camera. Both technological and artistic.

NEXT-->

As for future cameras, I think we'll see initially, 3x sensors allowing for on the fly HDR images. After that we'll go to static video where a framed shot can be spun around to see all the out of frame info.

NEXT-->

After that, I suppose we'll get selective depth of field, on the fly image editing, blemish correction and on the fly multi-image splicing allowing for a static family photo to be created via sliced video.

NEXT-->

Of course we'll have meta data including temperature, GPS, wind speed, angle, height, surrounding buildings, photographer's personal ID#, satellite upload, etc.

NEXT-->

Film will die in the same way that pinhole cameras are dead. Sure, it's around and you can use it but what's the point? The medium isn't the art. It's the person behind the camera.

Re:

[adolf]

I doubt we'll see 3x sensors for automagic HDR images in anything but very specific (ie, expensive) applications, for a few reasons:

- Cost. The current and obvious trend, at least toward the low end of digital photography, is to reduce sensor size as much as possible in order to manufacture more CCDs with a single wafer. 3 times as many sensors means 3 times as much cost. I suppose one could put all 3 CCDs onto a single die, making the whole package a bit smaller, but I doubt it'd help much with the fin

Re:

[richie2000]

Better, simpler, cheaper, and far more available results would be produced by improving the dynamic range of conventional single-CCD cameras.

Or just change the ISO on the fly, while doing the read-out from the sensor.

Re:

[kf6auf]

On the fly increasing of the ISO increases the noise of your pictures. As noise is what limits the low end of the range of CCDs, this means we would have to improve the dynamic range of the CCDs.

Re:

[richie2000]

As noise is what limits the low end of the range of CCDs, this means we would have to improve the dynamic range of the CCDs.

No, not really. If you could dynamically vary ISO from 100 to 1600 (which my Pentax K10D does statically) you'd get a 16-fold increase in the effective dynamic range from a single exposure that you'd need several exposures to get now. As you'd only bump up the ISO in the dark areas (and lower it in the bright areas), the noise would not be as prevalent as if you'd taken a single ISO 1600 shot today. And actually, the K10D has a low-budget way of doing this already - you can take up to 9 exposures and eithe

Re:

[matfud]

In the past 10 or so years there has been a lot of research into sensors that have a log response to light levels. This allows a very high dynamic range scene to be compressed into 8 to 12 bit output which is about the noise limit for the electronics in cameras. However the sensors are based on CMOS tech rather then CCD (photoresistors rather then electron buckets) and as such tend to have large fixed pattern and thermal noise issues.

matfud

Re:

[leenks]

Canon use CMOS sensors in all of their digital SLR range. Given how acclaimed these cameras are, especially in the areas of noise (almost universally best in their respective classes), I would say some of this problem has been tackled. Admittedly, there is always room for improvement though!

Re:Nostalgic?

[fyngyrz]

Too late. It's already happened. Same location on chip, so the same sensor size, essentially three sensors at three different depths. Sigma SD14 [dpreview.com], for instance. Price is right in the prosumer zone.

Re:

[dfghjk]

Foveon doesn't implement multiple sensors for automatic HDR. Is your point simply to be argumentative?

Re:

[fyngyrz]

Foveon implements multiple sensors, period, and using them for HDR is simply a matter of how they do dynamic range. Modern sensors are hitting 12...14 bits already; your eye is lucky to do eight with the iris at any one specific dilation. Most people are between 7 and 8 bits. Add your iris in, and you have a whole lot more, but that's not how we look at images.

As to whether they'll actually do HDR as a mode, I suspect they will. It is becoming surprisingly popular, considering how weird it makes images

Re:

[qupada]

Come back when you have a better idea of what you're talking about.

The actual, real world, demonstrated sensitivity of modern cameras is around 8-9EV (see http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/canoneos40d/page20.asp [dpreview.com]).

Yes, the DIGITAL OUTPUT from CCD/CMOS sensors might be 10/12/14 bits nowadays, but it pains me to have to explain that reading a 14 bit digital signal from an analogue device with ~9 bits worth of useful information doesn't actually provide any more dynamic range. Finer graduations yes (but si

Re:

[fyngyrz]

Come back when you have a better idea of what you're talking about.

Coming from you, with your boatload of misconceptions and bewilderment, that is actually quite funny. Thanks. You keep it up. One day that subscription to popular science will pay off for you.

Re:

[zzg]

The foevon sensor exploits the trait that different wavelenghts of light penetrate to differing depths in silicon. Thus by stacking the sensors they can leave out the colour filter and just capture the "rainbow" at different points, red being available the deepest in the chip.

As someone else noted, the FUJI SuperCCD SR seems capable of capturing 11EV, and I've seen HDR images created from single exposures with multiple raw conversions.

Re:

[badzilla]

That's why my pictures always turn out so crap, the damn camera can't record local wind speed information! One day though my work will be recognised...

its not really photography

[waterwingz]

Wasn't it the board of directors of Kodak who decide to not go the digital route, summing it up with the statement "If it doesn't contain silver halide, its not really photography" ?

Re:

[Tablizer]

Wasn't it the board of directors of Kodak who decide to not go the digital route, summing it up with the statement "If it doesn't contain silver halide, its not really photography" ?

Big corporations don't like risk, and changing the game means risk. Even though they owned key patents, triggering the expansion of digital would risk creating sleek newcomers that would eat into Kodak's market share.

I would compare it to IBM's decision to make their PC have a mostly open architecture. Yes, they held the marke

Re:

[inKubus]

Those Kodak photo kiosks at every pharmacy in the US are amazing. Print your digital pictures for a few cents. No stupid computers, no batches, no crap. Just bring in your memory card, or thumbdrive, or CD, or diskette, or the camera itself (or FTP/HTTP them right to the store from home). It reads everything, even Mac stuff, and you never have to buy toner. Easy to use browser to tag the photos you want to print. Select enlargements if you want them. If you send them off for the 3 day service you even

Re:

[fimbulvetr]

I would have to say I agree with him on the kiosks, who has anything better than this?

Re:

[fyngyrz]

I would have to say I agree with him on the kiosks, who has anything better than this?

I do. It's called a "hard drive" plus "backups", and said technology lets me keep my images around for display and printing on any hardware that comes along, hardware that will no doubt far exceed anything these kiosks you refer to can do today. In the meantime, LCD photo frames are fun, as is emailing images to the family. And of course, if we want prints, we can dump beautiful ones out in seconds using a photo pri

Re:

[LaughingCoder]

I have a URL for you: http://www.shutterfly.com/ [shutterfly.com]

We have been using their service for years. We have uploaded many gigabytes of pictures. There is no charge for, nor any limit on storage. Their prints are very good, and they make it pretty easy to create and share your digital albums. And except for the prints it's all free.

Reverse DLP

[inKubus]

What about the future of the digital camera? The CCD is reaching the end of it's useable life. They are just packing more and more pixels in, when really what you need is more levels of greyscale and a better signal to noise ratio. I'm wondering when they'll get rid of CCD entirely and move to a 4 "pixel" sensor with a DLP chip in between handling the scanning, instead of a bunch of piddly pixels on a 1/3" ccd. The sensors could be larger, with focusing lenses in between. The color isolation would be perfect. Plus you could use variable filtering/exposure PER COLOR based on the ambient light to do true (not digital enhancement after capture) white balancing. There's no reason a DLP couldn't work in reverse, I don't think. Other possibilities include nanotubes "tuned" to certain visible frequencies that cause them to vibrate slightly, etc.

There's also the liquid lenses such as Varioptic [varioptic.com], which are going to change what we know about photography. Coupled with GIS/GPS I think we're in for a great next century.

Re:

[wickerprints]

The problem with using a "reverse DLP" mechanism for light capture is that it's just not possible to scan several millions of pixels at higher shutter speeds. The method neither scales well with resolution nor time, unlike existing CMOS/CCD technologies which does scale very well with time, and reasonably well with resolution. Even worse, there is a more fundamental problem--the incoming photons through the aperture enter at different angles and energies. How do you properly distinguish them with a suffi

Re:

[inKubus]

I'm talking about focusing the light on one large sensor. If it can easily scan 30fps at 1080 you're looking at a 1/30s exposure, which isn't too bad. Furthermore, the mirrors actually flip hundreds of times faster to make the greyscales during projection. I admit this sounds disingenious but if you have multiple sensors for each color you could easily multiply the number of actual real world "pixels" or resolution seen by the camera without having more pixels on the sensor. Obviously they aren't the be

Re:

[JonathanBoyd]

If it can easily scan 30fps at 1080 you're looking at a 1/30s exposure, which isn't too bad.

Actually, that's pretty bad for a stills camera. 1/30s is the lowest speed most people can handhold a camera a a fairly standard focal length. For any sort of telephoto work, it's useless without stabilisation and for a look of photography, you wouldn't be freezing motion, or you'd be way overexposing the image. Get it up to 1/3000s and you're talking about useable speeds.

Re:

[evilviper]

I'm wondering when they'll get rid of CCD entirely and move to a 4 "pixel" sensor with a DLP chip in between handling the scanning, instead of a bunch of piddly pixels on a 1/3" ccd.

It doesn't take any skills at all to predict the demise of the CCD, in favor of CMOS sensors.

They're in the best (pro) digital cameras out there right now, and they're continually decreasing sensor noise, so it might not be long before a digital camera can actually take a picture at night and not look like fuzzy crap.

The sensors

Re:

[Andyvan]

I think you need to re-read his proposal. He said a 4 pixel sensor with a DLP chip *in between*. The incoming light would be reflected off of the DLP onto the 4 pixel scanner, much like running a DLP television in reverse.

As another poster said, it probably doesn't scale well. But it would be better than a banana.

-- Andyvan

Re:

[inKubus]

Imagine a beowolf clus I mean array of them. I'm still working it out. I was thinking maybe you could use an ANALOG sensor on the far end (the 4 pixels part) and then use a high range A/D converter to digitize the resulting waveform. Then I was thinking, maybe you could make one that the mirrors could scan in 3 different directions instead of just on-off, and have MORE sensors there. I don't know, I'm not really a scientist. They do have a switching speed of 15us which is quite a bit faster than typica

Re:

[femtobyte]

DLP works because you can fool a human eye into seeing a quickly-scanned point of light as a continuous image. Freeze a point in time, and the DLP is projecting a single bright point of light focused in one place. It's not practical to reverse this for taking photos, since the light coming from real-life objects that you want to photograph is usually coming from all points on the object at once. While you are scanning around the object looking at one small point at a time, you are wasting all the photons co

Re:

[photomonkey]

As a professional news and documentary still photographer, there are a few points I'd like to make:

1) DLP chips are notoriously fragile and even more susceptible to dust and dirt than CCDs/JFET/CMOS chips. DLPs AFAIK are also much more expensive to manufacture and are a lot more power hungry. I need to get 1-2 days of shooting on the same number of batteries.

2) I still use medium format film for a lot of things not intended for newspaper or magazine use only because it enlarges much better than a 12mp

Re:

[mpapet]

The CCD is reaching the end of it's useable life.

No. What's reaching the end of it's useable life is the idiotic sensor resolution race. Except letting anyone know that won't sell new cameras. It's not that all of the megapixels beyond 3 or so won't do any good, it's that all of them are pretty much useless. I know the new whatever model is "better" but that's not a direct result of sensor function.

when really what you need is more levels of greyscale and a better signal to noise ratio
Indeed, what most s

first picture?

[jmcnaught]

It's too bad they didn't include the first digital picture, that would have been neat to see. I couldn't find it on google, but I didn't really spend that long looking.
Hopefully they still have it kicking around somewhere. The comments in the CNET article suggest they know what the picture was of but I guess they couldn't find it either.

Re:

[Nimey]

It was actually of Goatse, which is why they had to destroy the only copy.

Re:

[jmcnaught]

Goatse is pretty grainy...

Re:

[matfud]

One of the first (and still the most commonly used image in image processing) is actaully porn

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenna [wikipedia.org]

matfud

Re:

[timothy]

Well, the Lenna pic is commonly used to demonstrate imaging / digitization, but the original image wasn't *captured* digitally, so your above claim makes more sense if you move the closing parenthesis to just after the word "used." :)

There's (naturally) a great Wikipedia article [wikipedia.org] about both Lena / Lenna and that photograph, which says that of the image that "Lenna is so widely accepted in the image processing community that Söderberg was a guest at the 50th annual Conference of the Society for Imaging S

Re:

[matfud]

It was captured digitaly. Or rather is was captured in as digital a manner as any pictures are. It was grabbed from a drum scanner. This had an analog front end from which the data was digitised. All digital cameras still have analog front ends. The readout from the CCD or CMOS sensor is always analog.

Admitidly it ain't a camera but it still set precident for the internet (porn).

Re:

[timothy]

Oh, sure -- at some point it made the leap from conventional photography to digital format (after all, we can ogle Lenna on The Innernet now :)), but it was not "a digital photo" in the sense that phrase would be used today -- the "capture" part was well after the creation of the image as an image (via photosensitive chemical film).

Don't mean to niggle -- I just don't think the original photo qualifies as "digital" ;)

timothy

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

The worlds first digital photo

  http://www.gizmag.com/go/4717/gallery/ [gizmag.com]

Re:

[rrohbeck]

>It's too bad they didn't include the first digital picture, that would have been neat to see. I couldn't find it on google, but I didn't really spend that long looking.
I'm sure it was a nude woman so they couldn't show it,

nothing can stop it

[User 956]

The resulting camera, pictured above on its first trip to Europe recently, was the size of a large toaster and weighed nearly 4kg. Black-and-white images were captured on a digital cassette tape, and viewing them required Sasson and his colleagues to develop a special screen.

Even if those conditions were the norm today, I guarantee you, pr0n would still be widely available in that format. and it would be completely awesome.

vision

[William Robinson]

The resolution was a revolutionary .01 megapixels and it took 23 seconds to record the first digital photograph. Talk about shutter lag.

Thankfully, Steven Sasson did not feel that nobody will ever need more that 0.01 megapixels:)

Re:

[fimbulvetr]

I was thinking more like 640Kp. Because it seems like 640k%s is enough for everyone.

Re:

[JPriest]

"it took 23 seconds to record the first digital photograph.". Some of the cameras today are not far off that in low lighting.

Re:

[syousef]

I wish I could click through all those links in 23 seconds. Where's the damned printer friendly version?

I've recently taken up photography...

[Entropius]

... and I only can because of digital, since I'm poor.

I recently bought a Panasonic FZ50 camera (super-sharp optically stabilized 35-420mm equivalent lens, f/2.8-3.7, 10MP 1/1.8" sensor, all the interesting bells and whistles) for $400. It's absolutely amazing; my only complaint is that the image processing software does some stupid things at ISO 400 or above related to boneheaded noise reduction, and you can bypass all that by shooting RAW. You can get a smaller model with a smaller sensor and fewer bells

Digital Cameras = More Freedom of Speech

[Airw0lf]

The most impressive thing to me about digital camera development is that serious photography is now within pretty much anyone's budget. It doesn't really make that much possible that wasn't possible before, but now it's all possible for amateurs with a reasonably inexpensive camera and free software.

It's also made it easier for people to exchange information. Point and shoot, and then e-mail the photos around the world in seconds. Think of all those Burmese cellphone cameras for instance. Going back 20 years, you'd mostly be reliant on photojournalists and well-to-do amateurs. Even then, those guys would have had to worry about smuggling film, or getting it secretly developed. In that sense digital cameras have been very democratising.

Re:

[CastrTroy]

I'll agree that all those digital cameras helped get the word out. But I don't really think it changed much. Terrible things still happened, and nobody stopped them. The UN (or anybody else) didn't send in any troops, and there were no trade sanctions induced to make them think twice about what they were doing. It's interesting that we can all now watch the atrocities that happen around the world, but it would be a lot better if we did something about it.

Re:

[fyngyrz]

The UN (or anybody else) didn't send in any troops, and there were no trade sanctions induced to make them think twice about what they were doing.

Well, just ask yourself: How much oil is there in Burma? And the answer is: Oil Production: 9500 Barrels Per Day (bbl/day) Oil Consumption: 20460 Barrels Per Day. Therefore, the monks die. But trust me, we are going to save Iraq. Yessir. We're gonna save it if it kills every last one of those locals, because they need to be saved. Might kill a few thousand

Still use film...

[dharmadove]

I like my digital cameras but my film cameras still get plenty of use. For astrophotography using cooled digital SBIG CCD sensors on my Takahashi TOA-130 APO and Celestron CGE 1100 with the capability to stack multiple images is the only way to go. Computer controlled, sitting inside snapping images in my office at my PC with autoguide over the net... Beats the old film days of freezing my butt off, sensitizing/loading the film and playing games with the developing. Yuk. On the other hand, when out in th

Wait! Kodak?

[blind biker]

(by the way, excellent article and photos, really enjoyed it!)

So, you're saying Kodak had the first digital camera in their house (and later, they produced Apple's digital cameras - read the article, you'll see..), and Kodak is today in commercial difficulties because their film business is failing - because of digital cameras' success?

While I have the greatest admiration for Kkodak's engineers and workers, to Kodak as a company I have to say: WHAT WERE YOU THINKING???

Re:

[soupforare]

On top of screwing their customers, repeatedly, for the past ~50 years, then ceasing production or changing niche films that long-time pro customers were used to, they couldn't see the Japanese assault on both markets. Fujifilm has had some crazy good emulsions in the last ~ten years and their SuperCCD equipped DSLRs are things of beauty. Not to mention that their P&S cameras are consistantly high-rated, even back when they were attempting to push the xD format.

Not even to mention Nikon, Canon, Pentax

Re:

[Crizp]

[...] then ceasing production or changing niche films that long-time pro customers were used to [...]

We want the good ol' Kodachrome back!!! http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=2657575 [somethingawful.com]

Re:

[Vellmont]

While I have the greatest admiration for Kkodak's engineers and workers, to Kodak as a company I have to say: WHAT WERE YOU THINKING???

Maybe they were thinking they can't stop progress and change?

Did Smith-Corona stop computers from replacing typewriters? No. Did the IBM stop the transition from punched cards and mechanical tabulators to magnetic media and digital computes? No.

Which company do you hear a lot about these days, and which one did you think might not even be in business?

The difference between

Re:

[blind biker]

Wow, way to completely missunderstand my point... You turned my post on the head, as I was saying exactly the opposite of what you assume.

Re:

[IvyKing]

...but I've never heard of a Smith-Corona printer.

They were making a daisywheel printer in the mid-1980's - pretty much the printer portion of their short-lived daisywheel typewriter. They also made 'Kleinschmidt' teleprinters, which were similar to the Teletype's.

Re:

[Megane]

While I have the greatest admiration for Kodak's engineers and workers, to Kodak as a company I have to say: WHAT WERE YOU THINKING???

At least Polaroid [wikipedia.org] had an excuse.

Whacky specs

[Mathness]

... which arrived in 1991. It packed a 2,048x2,048-pixel CCD and 8-bit storage.

Nice resolution. But really limited storage, even a tape deck would be better. :p

History of the camera in life

[Eccles]

I put together a "slide" show recently of my son's life for a family event. We had few, grainy pictures from his younger days, and lots of high quality pics from more recent times. (Didn't have enough time to scan film photos.) It's like the Calvin and Hobbes where Calvin's dad claimed the world was black and white when he was younger, then got grainy color and then finally high quality color around the time Calvin was born.

Spacecraft had digital cameras much earlier!

[Dr. Spork]

It's pretty fuckin lame for Kodak to be taking credit for the digital camera. For the entirety of the space race, we have been using digital photography. The Mariner and Voyager probes, for example, had some excellent digital cameras - they weren't exactly sending negatives back to an Earth-based lab! Voyager cameras were basically 60's technology, but some Voyager pictures of the gas planets and their moons have still not been surpassed.

Re:

[alexq]

For the entirety of the space race, we have been using digital photography.

Wasn't it actually analog, electronic photography? Like they've had for video since at least the 1950s - this thing called television. :) Which definitely was _not_ digital photography.

Re:

[IvyKing]

For the entirety of the space race, we have been using digital photography.

As alexq pointed out, the original electronic cameras (e.g. Tiros weather satellites) were analog in nature. I seem to recall that some of the early Mariner photos were actually film developed on board the spacecraft and scanned for transmission back to earth. The Voyagers used mid-1970's technology (CCD's?) and were examples of digital photography (including data compression). However, the camera on the Voyager was not a stand-alone system as it used the spacecrafts main computer for storage and processin

Re:

[dsgrntlxmply]

Voyager's cameras were vidicon tube based: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1982ApOpt..21..214B [harvard.edu]

Kodak's Spin Physics division introduced, I believe in 1986, the Ektapro 1000 high speed scientific imaging system, with an NMOS sensor.

"Staring focal plane array" (FPA) systems (typically infrared) for military use probably pre-date this and are comparable to digital cameras. Scanning FPA systems are earlier and might also qualify, depending upon where you care to draw the line.

my first Digi Cam

[nerdyalien]

My first digital camera was a Casio one with resolution 320x240 (back in 1997). It was an era still film cameras are mainstream. However, it was fairly bad camera in all measures.

Which then followed by an Olympus 1.3 MP camera in 2000. Which was really good, a quantum leap compared to my previous one.

Then I got my next one in 2005, Canon Powershot 510 (4MP). It is a good one with lot of features. But I always get its lens covering shutter damaged.. too delicate and exposed to outside.

39 MP? Peanuts!

[Lars Clausen]

They haven't done their research. They say Hasselblad is coming out with a 39MP camera, which will be the most megapixels yet. Not by far: The Seitz 6x17 [roundshot.ch] is 160 MP. Granted, it has a maximum shutter speed of 1 second with the full 160MP, but still... It's also huge. I am amused.

Excellent article on the NC2000

[klaiber]

Quite some time back, I read an article on the NC2000, an early-ish DSLR that really had a big impact on wire services and newspapers. It's very entertaining and amusing to read the travails of photographers working with this camera, including early experiences with color balance, anti-alias filters, or undesirable infrared sensitivity. Well worth a read:

http://www.robgalbraith.com/bins/multi_page.asp?cid=7-6463-7191 [robgalbraith.com]