Who invented Digital Camera?

Steven Sasson, 1975

The history of photography goes back about 200 years. The many generations of cameras all had one thing in common: images were recorded on glass plates or plastic film using chemical emulsions that were sensitive to light. They were made visible and permanent by chemical processing. Other than the briefly successful Polaroid process no camera took a picture you could look at immediately. Furthermore, the only way you could send a good quality photo to someone was as a hard copy printed on paper.

The comparison with today’s electronic or digital cameras is startling. You can view the image as soon as you have snapped it, and you can send it down a phone line or cable, confident it will arrive looking good. And processing is easy. You can play with images, enlarge them, change the framing or color balance; things that previously look hours in the dark room.

History of invention:

This world of digital imaging is very new, for the everyday photographer at least. The first affordable electronic cameras reached the market only in the early 1990s. Their origins lay a few decades further back, and derive much from the development of television. That, too, required technology to convert images into electric currents. In most digital cameras, the key component is the CCD based like the computer chip on semiconductors such as silicon. A CCD is an array of light sensitive cells that accumulate electric charge in proportion to the brightness of the light that falls on them, much as solar cells do. The level of charge on the pixels can be read out one by one, the data stored and processed to recreate the scene.

The first CCDs, built in the 1970s, were crude; with only 10000 pixels (modern cameras boast millions of pixels). The images were correspondingly fuzzy. The first attempt to build one of these into a camera, undertaken by Steven Sasson at Eastman-Kodak in 1973, was equally clunky. The camera weighed 4 kg and took 20 seconds per image. It was only a technical exercise to see if it could be done, not intended for the market.

But the exercise began an inevitable trend, one that will ultimately kill off the business that Kodak pioneered cameras using film. Such cameras are not yet dead, but they live on mostly in one niche, as the cheap, disposable cameras of last resort, used in emergencies or extreme environments such as underwater. These cameras trade off cost and disposability against image quality and just about every other feature of both traditional and digital photography. It is a rather sad farewell.

The evolution of the digital camera has been swift, in line with the rest of information technology. We see the same trends: ever increasing capabilities at ever decreasing cost. Early digital cameras cost $ 10000 or more; that price has shrunk at least 20-fold. Progress has been aided by the development of international standards for storing images in digital code, such as the JPEG format devised by the joint Photography Expert Group. Among other things, this allows images to be ‘compressed’. A great deal of information in an images to be ‘compressed. A great deal of information in an image can be discarded without unacceptable loss of quality, as with DVDs and MP3 players. As a result, images take up much less space in computer memories and can be quickly transmitted by email or over the Internet.

New sorts of data storage, such as ‘flash memory’, let a camera store more pictures, Inkjet printer generate quality copies on demand. Cameras continue to get smaller, now often barely larger than a credit card, able to be secreted in a mobile phone or in hard to reach places. Similar technology has transformed video cameras. Most electronic cameras will now take both still and moving pictures. We have come a very long way in little more than a decade.

The digital camera transformation raises a host of issues. Simplicity and ubiquity (such as in mobile phones) have encouraged some inappropriate use, with invasions of privacy that can verge on assault. The capacity to manipulate images by digitally altering the location and content of individual pixels has damaged our confidence that ‘the camera never lies’. Surveillance in public places is easier and cheaper and therefore more common. This no doubt helps with the maintenance of law and order but asks a question about our right to privacy once we step out of our front doors. Digital cameras are one of the ways we can create and access information freely for ourselves, a capacity central to the information age, open to both use and abuse.