1968 – 1973

Inventing the First Digital Camera

by Steven Sasson

Soon after arriving at Eastman Kodak, I received the opportunity to investigate a new charge coupled device (CCD) that was a light sensitive area array. I thought it would be an interesting idea to use this type of electronic imaging chip to build an all-electronic still imaging camera device. That is, a camera that didn’t use photographic film but would instead record an image by digitizing the output of this CCD imaging chip and storing that data. I was excited by the idea of building an “all-electronic still image” camera that would require no moving parts at all. Also, since the image would be stored in a digital electronic format it would be possible to view the image electronically, on a conventional television set. This would mean that no photographic prints would be required to view the image. This was quite a departure from how photography was practiced up to this point but it seemed to me to have several advantages if it could be accomplished with the same level of performance and reliability as film-based photography. My first 1975 prototype camera and playback imaging system crudely demonstrated most of these features but was a far cry from coming close to performance of consumer film-based cameras of the time. It took another 20 years for this approach to consumer photography to begin to enter the market place and an additional 10 years or so to displace film-based cameras as the consumer’s choice for capturing their images. It took almost a year of work in the laboratory to construct both the camera and what we called the playback system (the device that enabled us to view the image captured by the camera). During that time, we were not able to “see “ anything captured by the camera itself. The only measure of our progress was accomplished by observing oscilloscope waveforms and voltage measurements on our lab voltage meters. Both the camera prototype and the playback device had to work in order to actually see any images. That point was reached in December 1975. Our first real image was of a young lab technician who was working down the hall from our lab. She agreed to have her image taken by me with my very odd-looking prototype camera. The image was captured in 50 milliseconds but it took 23 seconds to record the digitally stored image on a cassette tape drive that was part of the camera. To display the image, the tape was removed from the camera and placed in the playback system, which then displayed the black-and-white image on a TV set. This head-and-shoulders shot of the lab technician was the first digital snapshot by our system.