Let's take a trip back to 1975, the year the digital camera was born. Here is the Gadget Lab entry as it would have appeared 33 years ago:
Kodak's Steve Sasson has come up with a brand new alternative to film. Dubbed "Film-less Photography", the prototype camera records images and plays them back on a television set. Sasson hacked together the camera from spare parts: the lens is from a Super 8 movie camera, the image is captured by a CCD (Charged Coupled Device, an array of capacitors which convert light into an electrical signal) and the resulting image is recorded onto a cassette tape. The whole thing is powered by 16 nickel cadmium batteries.
The portable electronic still camera takes 23 seconds to record a 100 line image to tape. To view the picture, you pop out the cassette and slip it into the custom-built playback device. This uses another cassette player and a frame store to boost the image to 400 lines and outputs a standard NTSC signal for use on any television. The Kodak engineers are optimistic:
We're not so sure. Who would want to look at pictures on a TV screen? And even with leaps and bounds in technology, I predict that people won't want to press the shutter and wait for the camera to snap a picture seconds later. We'll stick with our Instamatics.
Look at that. Even back in 1975 I was moaning about shutter lag in digicams, and they still haven't fixed it. Check out the history behind the first digicam on Sasson's blog.
We Had No Idea [Steve Sasson's Posts via Retro Thing]
