History of Digital Photography

Pop quiz question: Topic: history of digital photography. When was the first digital camera used?

I bet you answered “in the 1990s.”  Actually the first digital camera was used in 1963. A Stanford University student invented a videodisk camera that took a photograph and stored that image on a disk. This image only lasted for a few minutes but it was the first digital image.

The real core of digital photography did not appear until 1969.
On October 17, 1969, the charge-coupled device (CCD) was invented at Bell Labs by George Smith and Willard Boyle.  Oddly enough they were not actually working on digital imaging but they were trying to come up with an innovative semiconductor memory for computers. When they were not working on the memory, they were trying to develop a solid-state camera that could be used in video phones.  They succeeded in building the CCD in the first solid-state video camera in 1970.

These attempts were all preliminary to the digital camera as we know it today. The first prototype digital camera was produced in 1981 by Sony Corporation. The Mavica electronic still camera was able to capture magnetic impulses as images. These images were stored on a two-inch still-video floppy disk using CCD technology. The disk held up to 50 images in a low resolution format.

The Mavica was more of a video camera than a digital camera. It just had the ability to capture freeze-frames. Kodak came out with the mega pixel sensor in 1986 that was able to record 1.4 million pixels and therefore yield a 5x7-inch digital photo-quality print. This was the beginning of digital photography as we know it today.

Fuji meanwhile had come out with a digital camera, The Fuji DS-1P in 1988. This camera was able to record images to a 16 mg card and was the first digital camera as we know them today but it was never marketed in the United States.

Kodak had the first digital camera available to the United States. The Kodak DCS-100 had a 1.3 mega pixel sensor, a 200 megabyte internal hard drive, and a SCSI connector. The cost for this Kodak digital camera back then; about $13,000.

As with so many innovations, once the first breakthroughs were made, the concept caught on and during the 1990s a great many improvements to digital photography were made. So many that by the end of the century, more traditional types of photography began to fall by the wayside.