Retro Computing Corner: World’s First Digital Camera (c. 1975)
Author: SmellyGeekBoy | Date: May 4, 2008
This digital camera prototype was invented in 1975 by Kodak engineers Steven Sasson and Jim Schueckler. It was the size of a toaster, and captured black and white images at a resolution of 100×100 - or 0.01 megapixels in today’s marketing terminology. The images were stored on cassette tape, taking 23 seconds to write.
The camera uses an ADC from Motorola, a bog-standard (for the 1970s) lens from a Kodak movie camera, and a CCD chip from Fairchild Semiconductor - the same technology that digital cameras still use today. To playback the images, a special computer and tape reader setup (pictured below) was built, outputting the grainy images on a standard TV. It took a further 23 seconds to read each image from tape.
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Not bad for 1975, eh? It’s strange how it took nearly 30 years for the technology to really catch on, although I’m pretty sure the big film manufacturers, including Kodak themselves, had something to do with it.
Yes, but does it take standard compact flash storage cards? Because I won’t plonk down a dime otherwise.
Surely everyone has some old cassettes lying around that they no longer have a use for? After all, At 23 seconds per image, that’s over 200 images per 90-minute tape!
I wonder if they built any error correction into this thing, or if warped / damaged parts of the tape resulted in interference in the image? The mind boggles.