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THE INVENTION OF THE DIGITAL CAMERA

Steven Sasson

I worked at Eastman Kodak Company for over 35 years. I had the opportunity to design and build the first digital camera for consumer use, and that was in the early ’70s.

I was working in an applied research laboratory, and I had a supervisor whose name was Gareth Lloyd. I remember one day, he came to me and said that he had a small project that I might like to dabble in. It was looking at these new charge-coupled imaging devices [CCDs] that had just become available. And so I jumped at the chance, and our whole conversation probably lasted less than 30 seconds. He said, “Well, get one of these things, play around with it, and see what kind of imaging performance it may have.” So it was an almost nothing project. The gears started turning, and I said, well, if I’m going to do some imaging measurements, it would be helpful to capture an image, and then it would be nice if I put it in a camera form, so I could move around, take images of different things. And then I thought, well, if it’s all electronic, that would be really neat, because there’d be no moving parts in this camera, and I got excited about that idea, you know, being an electrical guy.

And so I adopted a completely digital approach, not because I had any great vision, I think; it was because I really didn’t know how to do it any other way. I had no idea, actually, how to build this, you understand, and because the project was really low key, basically, nobody knew we were working on it. I could fail a lot, and no one would really observe it. I had to go around and ask a lot of people about how I might do things, where I’d get parts. The camera that you see before you is all spare parts.

What worried me was the comparison to film, and the fact that you could reliably capture an image on film was a foregone conclusion. Nobody ever worried about losing an image when you captured it on film. It just didn’t happen. And so tape was by far the most reliable mechanism for storing digital data—and remember, this project involved both the creation of the camera that you see here, but also a playback unit, which was based on a microprocessor development system. Microprocessor chips had just started coming out. The only way to view a captured electronic image was by using a television set. The project took about a year and during that whole time the only way to see progress was through electronic measurements, never seeing an image until the entire system was complete.

There came a day in December of 1975 when we kind of realized we had done all we could. It looked like data was going through. I took a tape, and I put it in the unit. We were located in just about the most unphotogenic place in the universe, our lab. So I picked the camera up and I walked down the hallway, and I found a young lab technician, her name was Joy Marshall at the time, and she was sitting at a teletype, I’ll never forget this: I said to her, “May I take your picture?” And she knew us, you know, the weird guys in the back lab, so she knew we were harmless, if not strange, and she posed for a picture, and I took a head-and-shoulders shot of her. She had long dark hair, and there was sort of a white background. So I took the camera up, looked through the viewfinder, and I clicked it.

First click turns the power on. You had to wait a second for the CCD to clear after first activating it, and the second click would actually capture the image [a 50 msec exposure]. The tape would start to turn as the captured image was being recorded. That’s how I knew it was working. After taking the picture, I walked back to the lab. Jim Schueckler, a key contributor to this project, came with me, and Joy followed us. After the image was recorded on the tape, I popped it out of the camera, put it in the playback unit, and about 30 seconds later, an image popped up on the screen, and what we saw was the silhouette—her silhouette and hair, you could see. You could see the white background, but her face was complete frozen static, completely unrecognizable. Now we were very happy to see this distorted image, because we knew there was a high probability of not seeing anything at all!

Now Joy, who was standing behind us looking over our shoulder, was less impressed with the image, and she said, “It needs work,” turned around and walked out. I’ll never forget that. What had happened was, when I designed the playback unit, I reversed the order of the bits. We figured it out, and we actually switched some wires—that was cheaper and easier than reprogramming the computer—and then the image popped up, and it was a big thrill. We actually saw it; it looked good. Well, this first array was a matrix of 100 by 100, so that’s 10,000 pixels, or .01 megapixels in today’s parlance. Now, today’s cameras are typically 10 megapixels, 12 megapixels.

Kodak was working on this years and years ago. We didn’t know exactly where it was going to go. We clearly had a very successful business model with film. You know, we take for granted the Internet today, or photographic printing on a desktop. None of that existed back in ’75, or in ’85. I guess you have to remember that when you’re an inventor, the whole world’s inventing along with you, and your idea may take its final form in a world that you can’t even predict, because other people are doing interesting things.