Steven Sasson and Jim Schueckler developed the first camera with CCD sensor at Kodak in 1975. They used a fairchild CCD chip with a resolution of 100 × 100 pixels. The sensor was in a massive housing weighing 3.6 kilograms, the recording and subsequent data storage on cassette lasted 23 seconds.
1975 to 1980 - The years in the research laboratory
If one believes the hall whisper in the relevant forums, a colleague should have been the first photomodel. Because the picture was out of focus, she read the two Levites properly: "Guys, you need REAL work." The Kodak management apparently looked similar and did not pursue the innovative approach. In the opulent jubilee volume "The Story of Kodak" on the 100th anniversary of the company 1990, a whole chapter deals with the future of photography. Sasson and the digital camera but not in it?
1981 to 1987 - The still video years
However, the roots of digital technology are far more advanced than in 1975. As early as 1679, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz developed the binary payment system, which is the basis for all digital processes. In the 1930s, the two mathematicians Raymond Valtat and Konrad Zuse independently developed computer-controlled computing machines. They are now regarded as the forerunners of today's computer technology.
1988 to 1990 - Digital Save
A prerequisite for the construction of the first digital camera was the CCD image sensor (Charge Coupled Device), which Willi Starck and George Smith 1969 developed in the Bell Labaratories. They wanted to investigate chips for the use as data storage and discovered their light sensitivity. The first CCD image sensor was built in 1970 and improved in the following years.
1990 to 1996 - First tools
Already before the CCD sensor, scanners were established for capturing images, with which photos and documents were imported electronically and converted into digital files for further processing. Their history dates back to the 1950s and '60s. As the fathers of this development are the American Russell Kirsch and the American Rudolf Hell, who, among other things, invented the fax.
The technological breakthrough of digital photography finally led to the development of information technology and telecommunications. Because of their wide use, digital technology created the common basic technology necessary for storing and processing digital images.
The first camera, which stored photos electronically - instead of on a silver film - came from Sony. The manufacturer's Magnetic Video Camera System (MAVICA), which became known in the early 1980s with the Walkman, stored images on floppy disks.
The Mavica had a CCD image converter with 570 x 490 pixels and a sensitivity of ISO 200 for the recording and saved the photo not digital, but as an analog electronic video image. For further processing, the image signal had to be digitized with an analog-to-digital converter card. The PC had just been invented and not yet ready for image processing. You could see the pictures on the TV.
The Mavica was built as an SLR with an interchangeable lens, the system comprised three lenses: a 25- and 50-millimeter fixed focal length as well as a 16-65mm zoom. The shutter speed was 1/60 s, the aperture had to be manually adjusted according to the light conditions. The Mavica stored up to 50 color images on the Mavipak floppy disks.
Lesetipp: Photography Guide at a glance
Other manufacturers also saw the potential of silvery photography, and so some still video cameras followed the Mavica. Canon was already testing the wireless transmission of photos over the telephone line to a Japanese daily newspaper during the Olympic Games 1984. The experiment was successful and brought the RC-701 a certain popularity at a price of approximately 2000 euros - especially for daytime newspapers, for whose coarse print grid the quality of the 187,000 pixels was sufficient.
The RC-701 was a SLR with several automatic programs, a fast series mode (up to 10 frames per second) and shutter speeds between 1/2000 and 1/8 s. Nikon also did not want to let itself loose and brought the QV-1000C with 300,000 Pixels on the market. However, the still video finally became salonable in 1987 with the Canon ION series, which was the first still video camera to address the mass market.
The 1980s saw the last great flowering of analogue cameras into the photographic history. The electronics came in and triggered a boom in the market. Smart compacts with autofocus and automatic exposure metering were million sensors, for example the Olympus μ. Analogue SLRs shone with more and more refined automatics - right up to TTL-Blitzmessung - and received for the first time an LC status display.
The digital revolution took place in the background and reached its peak in 1988. The Moving Pictures Expert Group (MPEG) developed a standard for the compression of audio and video data: MPEG-1. It was only a short time later that JPEG (after the Joint Photographic Expert Group) was developed, a method of image compression, which is still standard today.
In 1988, PhotoMac, the first image processing program for Macintosh computers, came onto the market - similar software for PCs was still far away. The first step towards the reusability of photos on the computer, Canon had already gone 1987 with the RC-470. It saved images in the same way as floppy disks like all still video cameras, but could also read computer-readable floppy disks using an external SCSI drive.
Lesetipp: Memory cards in test
In the same year, an invention of Fujifilm irrevocably changed the market: On the xD-Picture card, data was actually digital, and not as before analogue, magnetically stored and could thus be imported without computer pulls on the computer. The first cameras with memory card came from Fujifilm (DS-X) and Toshiba (IMC-100) in 1990.
From 1990, digital photography began: Kodak introduced the DCS-100, a modified Nikon F3, in which almost the entire electronics were housed in a kilo-heavy cradle, the Digital Storage Unit (DSU). The data were played on the 200 megabyte hard drive via cables from the 1.3 megapixel CCD, which sat in the back instead of the movie.
The DCS-100 cost as much as a car of the upper middle class and enjoyed a high reputation among professionals who count every minute. Finally, they saved the time for filment development and the making of the prints.Then later DCS models came out without DSU. They had integrated hard disk drives and later PCMCIA flash memory cards. Only since 1994 were flash memory small enough for the construction of compact digital cameras.
Lesetipp: Free Photoshop Alternatives
Trendsetter of digital photography in the mass market was Logitech, until then as a manufacturer of PC accessories appeared. The Logitech Fotoman was designed for a lot of things, was easy to use and designed with its fixed focal length of 55 mm (corresponding to Kleinbild) and the fixed focus for snapshot photographers. They could screw a neutral density filter or a wide angle converter onto the filter thread. -The exposure metering and control were done automatically in the Fotoman, and even an automatic flash was on board.
The 1/3-inch CCD of the Fotoman delivered grayscale images with a resolution of 376 x 240 pixels and 8 bits. In its integrated, 4 megabyte DRAM fit up to 32 images in the manufacturer-specific file format, which after the transfer to the PC with the supplied software into JPEGs were converted. A later model could also take 24-bit color images with a resolution of 496 x 358 pixels as an alternative to the gray scale images.
At this time electronic image processing became popular. In 1990, Adobe introduced its first version of Photoshop. As a result, more digital camera models quickly appeared for the consumer market, including Megasellers such as the Kodak DC40. Apple also used the QuickTake 150 in this field.
Lesetipp: Photoshop Elements vs. Paintshop Pro
From 1992 came digital cameras from practically all well-known manufacturers on the market. In 1995, Casio was the first manufacturer to have a viewfinder with a compact consumer camera QV-10, a display with live view was responsible for the selection of the image section. A constructive novelty was its pivoting lens, which other manufacturers also temporarily took up.
Among the peculiarities of the 1990s is the Photo CD, which Kodak presented in 1992. This was a system for the relatively inexpensive digitization and archiving of microfilm films. While professionals and dedicated amateurs used the system to rescue old analogue images into the digital age, the system flopped at the consumer market and became obsolete with the increasing digitalization
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