The inventor of the digital camera

January 9, 2012 @ 5:52PM

The inventor of the digital camera

Long before DSLRs, Micro 4/3rds, Photoshop, or HDR…Steve Sasson invented the digital Camera.

In 1975, as a newly hired electrical engineer employed by Eastman Kodak, Steve and a few fellow engineeers, successfully built a working prototype of a digital imaging device that used a CCD (Charged-Coupled Device) to capture a still image.

The device shown below is "the world's first known operational electronic CCD still image digital camera". I might add, that it was portable as well. It weighed 13 pounds.

"It was a camera that didn’t use any film to capture still images - a camera that would capture images using a CCD imager and digitize the captured scene and store the digital info on a standard cassette. It took 23 seconds to record the digitized image to the cassette. The image was viewed by removing the cassette from the camera and placing it in a custom playback device. This playback device incorporated a cassette reader and a specially built frame store. This custom frame store received the data from the tape, interpolated the 100 captured lines to 400 lines, and generated a standard NTSC video signal, which was then sent to a television set." - Kodak

Kodak engineer's revolutionary idea

US Patent U.S. Patent

At it's peak, Kodak had one of the most innovative research laboratories in the world. It's digital patents are in almost every electronic device out there. What most people do not know, is that hundreds if not thousands of amazing digital imaging technologies originated from Kodak digital imaging patents which were produced by hundreds of Kodak researchers, engineers, designers and employees.

"If Kodak does go bankrupt, its portfolio of patents could be auctioned off to pay its bills. And for now, investors are pretty skeptical the company can survive. Kodak was once so important it was among the 30 companies in the Dow Jones industrial average. This week, its stock price fell well below a dollar a share, and it could be delisted from the New York Stock Exchange altogether." - Mark Zupan - U of Rochester, A Digital Death? Why Kodak Stopped Clicking | Boise State Public ...

"Mining its patent portfolio has raised nearly $2 billion in licensing fees since 2008, and it is pinning its hopes on a potential $3 billion sale of its 1,100 digital-imaging patents.

The question now is whether those measures will be enough to keep Kodak afloat." - The Salt Lake Tribune

Ironically, the invention of the digital camera may have been the undoing of what once was a great company, with uncompromising products, produced by great people. As a former Kodak employee and one of their digital inventors, I find this to be truly unfortunate.

For more, read: We Had No Idea

The following is an interesting look at the process of invention.

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