“The camera described in this report represents a first attempt demonstrating a photographic system which may, with improvements in technology, substantially impact the way pictures will be taken in the future” — a line from the technical report written to sum up Steve Sasson’s project. Sasson, on
Kodak’s site, wrote, “It is funny now to look back on this project and realize that we were not really thinking of this as the world’s first digital camera. We were looking at it as a distant possibility. Maybe a line from the technical report written at the time sums it up best. But in reality, we had no idea…”
“In December of 1975, after a year of piecing together a bunch of new technology in a back lab at the Elmgrove Plant in Rochester, we were ready to try it. It had a lens that we took from a used parts bin from the Super 8 movie camera production line… On the side of our portable contraption, we shoehorned in a portable digital cassette instrumentation recorder.” He added, “Add to that 16 nickle cadmium batteries, a highly temperamental new type of CCD imaging area array, an a/d converter implementation stolen from a digital voltmeter application, several dozen digital and analog circuits all wired together on approximately half a dozen circuit boards.”
“It was a camera that didn’t use any film to capture still images — a camera that would capture images using a CCD imager and digitize the captured scene and store the digital info on a standard cassette. It took 23 seconds to record the digitized image to the cassette. The image viewed by removing the cassette from the camera and placing it in a custom playback device; incorporated a cassette reader a specially built frame store. This custom frame store received the data from the tape, interpolated the 100 captured lines to 400 lines, and generated a standard NTSC video signal, which was then sent to a television set,” he wrote.
He had demonstrated this project to many internal Kodak audiences throughout 1976, and he and the people of the 1970’s Kodak Apparatus Division Research Laboratory had called it “Film-less Photography.” The questions coming up at the time of his demonstration were, “Why would anyone ever want to view his or her pictures on TV? How would you store these images? What does an electronic photo album look like? When would this type of approach be available to the consumer?”
Sasson and his colleagues had had no idea to answer those questions, but an internal report had been written and a patent had been granted on this concept in 1978 (US 4,131,919). About the prototype and the patent, Sasson wrote, “I kept the prototype camera with me as I moved throughout the company over the last 30 years. Outside the patent, there was no public disclosure of our work until 2001
Articles Source :
www.exposure-magz.com
