Way back in 1975 — when Kodachrome color slides and Kodak Instamatics were all the rage — Kodak researcher Steve Sasson built the first digicam, cobbled together from spare parts and bleeding edge digital technology.
The lens was from a used parts bin on Kodak’s Super 8 camera assembly line, it used a futuristic CCD image sensor (now commonplace) and took 23 seconds to record a crude 100 line black and white image onto cassette tape.The device was semi-portable, and a massive VCR-sized microcomputer was used to display the images on a TV screen using a primitive frame store, but I doubt that the Kodak executives saw digital technology as a credible threat to their existing product line.Way back in 1975 — when Kodachrome color slides and Kodak Instamatics were all the rage — Kodak researcher Steve Sasson built the first digicam, cobbled together from spare parts and bleeding edge digital technology.
The lens was from a used parts bin on Kodak’s Super 8 camera assembly line, it used a futuristic CCD image sensor (now commonplace) and took 23 seconds to record a crude 100 line black and white image onto cassette tape.
The Kodak Apparatus Division Research Laboratory team demonstrated the technology to a number of people within Kodak in 1976 as “Film-less Photography.” A patent was issued for the technology, but it was decades ahead of its time. Sasson kept the prototype as he moved around the company, but Kodak didn’t publicly acknowledge the creation of the world’s first digicam until 2001.