A prototype, not a product
The camera most often credited as the first digital camera was a laboratory experiment built at Eastman Kodak in Rochester, New York, in 1975. Its builder was Steven Sasson, a young electrical engineer who had been asked by a supervisor to see what could be done with a new kind of light sensor. Kodak never sold it. The title “first digital camera” is therefore a judgment about an experiment, and it deserves some caution.
The sensor behind it
The key component was the charge-coupled device, or CCD, invented in 1969 at Bell Labs by Willard Boyle and George Smith, who were awarded a share of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics for it. A CCD is a silicon chip divided into many small light-sensitive cells. Light striking a cell builds up an electrical charge in proportion to its brightness, and the charges can be shifted out of the chip one by one and measured. The first CCDs were intended mainly as memory devices; their use as image sensors came soon after. Fairchild Semiconductor produced a CCD with a grid of 100 by 100 cells in the early 1970s, which is the type of sensor Sasson is generally reported to have used.
How the 1975 camera worked
By his own and Kodak’s later accounts, Sasson assembled the device from a lens taken from a movie camera, the CCD sensor, a set of circuit boards to convert the signals to digital values, and a standard audio cassette recorder to store the data. The details usually cited are:
- A resolution of 100 by 100 pixels, which equals 10,000 pixels, or 0.01 megapixels.
- Black-and-white images only.
- A recording time of about 23 seconds for each image.
- A weight of around 8 pounds.
There was no screen on the camera. To see a picture, the cassette had to be placed in a separate playback unit connected to a television set, which reconstructed the image. This arrangement is why the machine is sometimes described as a digital camera in the sense of capturing and storing images as numbers, but not as a camera that resembles the ones that later reached shops.
Reactions at the time
Kodak made much of its profit from film, paper and chemicals, and the company’s executives are often said to have been skeptical or unsure about an electronic camera. Sasson has recalled that the reaction was cautious, and some accounts add that it was treated as an interesting experiment. Kodak patented the design later, and the patent became commercially valuable in the years after. How much of the company’s later struggles can be traced to this period is a matter of debate among business writers, and it is wise not to oversimplify it.
Why “first” is disputed
Several things make the claim to be first less clear than it seems:
Earlier digital images. In 1957, Russell Kirsch and colleagues at the U.S. National Bureau of Standards scanned a photograph into one of the first computers in the United States, creating one of the first digital images. This was a scanner, not a camera.
Space imaging. In the 1960s, NASA probes took pictures that were transmitted to Earth as digital data. Those were electronic cameras of a sort, but built for a mission rather than as freestanding cameras, and most television-style imaging of the time still relied on camera tubes rather than solid-state chips.
Competing patents. Patent filings from the early 1970s, including one by Texas Instruments, described filmless electronic cameras. Whether a working device was built from those designs is less well documented.
Analog electronic cameras. Sony’s Mavica of 1981 recorded still pictures on a floppy disk, but as an analog video signal rather than digital data, so it is not usually counted.
Definitions. “Digital camera” can mean any camera that records numbers; a camera that is portable; a camera with a display; or a camera sold to consumers. By the last definition, the first models came in the 1980s and 1990s, and the earliest of them are credited to companies such as Fuji, Dycam, Apple, Casio and Kodak.
From prototype to consumer product
Sasson’s camera shows what could be done; it did not show how to make it cheap. A mass-market version needed much denser sensors, memory that was much cheaper than cassette tape, and low-power electronics. Those arrived over about twenty years. Compression techniques, notably JPEG, which was standardized around 1992, reduced file sizes enough to fit pictures on small memory cards. Progress in silicon chips and the cost of computer memory made the rest possible. By the mid-1990s, consumer models connected to home computers were on sale, and the same sensor idea eventually reached smartphones.
What can be said with confidence
It is well documented that an engineer at Kodak built a working CCD-based digital still camera in 1975 and that it recorded black-and-white images to cassette. It is reasonable to call it the first self-contained digital camera of that kind. It is not reasonable to say that digital photography began on a single day or that no one else had worked on similar ideas.