So where and when exactly did we change from using traditional film cameras to new cutting edge digital cameras that plug into computers? At what point in our history did we jump from film and darkrooms to lightroom, photoshop and 8gb memory cards?
The invention of digital photography and modern high spec cameras is set back in the 1950’s believe it or not! It’s the same technology that was used to create television images and the history of digital photography must therefore come during this time from the invention of video images that were recorded onto tape by electrical or digital impulses. This carried on through the 1960’s and it was spy satellite technology in which these digital impulses and its photo technology were then advanced by the American government and by NASA. The 1970’s saw major players patent this new photography technology such as texas instruments in 1972 with a camera that held no film. It is not known however if this patented design for a digital camera was ever actually built. The first digital camera that was built was by Steve Sasson, an engineer at Eastman Kodak. It used solid state CCD chips developed by Fairchild Semiconductor in 1973. It had a resolution of 0.01 megapixel! A far cry from todays apple iphones that have 3 megapixels or a top of the range Hasselblad H3DII-39MS SLR Digital Camera with 39 megapixels!
The camera built by Steve Sasson can still be seen to this day on display at Kodak New York. It was not built as a product to be sold but as more of a technical brief to see if the idea would in fact work. It was not until 1981 though that Sony brought out a commercial digital camera that used a small computer disk drive to capture video images. Despite Kodak also making cameras that converted light to digital images it was not until 1986 that the first mega pixel camera was produced capable of recording 1.4 million pixels that could produce a 5 x 7-inch digital output in print.
In 1991 the Kodak digital camera system or (dcs) was introduced. This was called the DCS-100 and attatched was a Nikon f3 camera body to a DSU or digital storage unit. It all looked a little bulky and was certainly no where near the stylish and slim all in one units that are on the market today. Next up around 2 years later was the DCS-200 camera which again used a combination of Nikon and Kodak technology but was the first all in one unit and was a huge step forward from the DCS-100. It had a SCSI interface to download the images to a pc.
Fast forward a decade and of course the SCSI interface has become redundant and USB is now the preferred connection method from digital camera to pc or macintosh as we strive for faster methods to transfer the ever increasing file sizes from our large 8gb or 16gb memory cards to our desktop computers. We are already seeing high definition technology added to many of our mid range digital cameras such as the Nikon d300s or Canon eos 500d. The next leap will no doubt see USB cables become obsolete as high speed wifi data transfer networks worldwide become the norm. Backing up our photos to our webspace via a 100mbps wireless network whilst shooting landscape photographs at the beach or capturing 3D images and 3D video on your mobile phone will be upon us sooner than we think! Infact just do a search for 3D wedding photography and the options out there now are really something!