History of the camera - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

The history of the camera can be traced back much further than the introduction of photography

Photography

Photography is the art, science and practice of creating durable images by recording light or other electromagnetic radiation, either electronically by means of an image sensor or chemically by means of a light-sensitive material such as photographic film...

. Photographic cameras evolved from the camera obscura

Camera obscura

The camera obscura is an optical device that projects an image of its surroundings on a screen. It is used in drawing and for entertainment, and was one of the inventions that led to photography. The device consists of a box or room with a hole in one side...

, and continued to change through many generations of photographic technology, including Daguerreotype

Daguerreotype

The daguerreotype was the first commercially successful photographic process. The image is a direct positive made in the camera on a silvered copper plate....

s, calotype

Calotype

Calotype or talbotype is an early photographic process introduced in 1841 by William Henry Fox Talbot, using paper coated with silver iodide. The term calotype comes from the Greek for 'beautiful', and for 'impression'....

s, dry plate

Dry plate

Dry plate, also known as gelatin process, is an improved type of photographic plate. It was invented by Dr. Richard L. Maddox in 1871, and by 1879 it was so well introduced that the first dry plate factory had been established...

s, film

Photographic film

Photographic film is a sheet of plastic coated with an emulsion containing light-sensitive silver halide salts with variable crystal sizes that determine the sensitivity, contrast and resolution of the film...

, and digital camera

Digital camera

A digital camera is a camera that takes video or still photographs, or both, digitally by recording images via an electronic image sensor. It is the main device used in the field of digital photography...

Camera obscura

Photographic cameras were a development of the camera obscura

Camera obscura

, a device dating back to the ancient Chinese and ancient Greeks

Ancient Greece

Ancient Greece is a civilization belonging to a period of Greek history that lasted from the Archaic period of the 8th to 6th centuries BC to the end of antiquity. Immediately following this period was the beginning of the Early Middle Ages and the Byzantine era. Included in Ancient Greece is the...

, which uses a pinhole

Pinhole camera

A pinhole camera is a simple camera without a lens and with a single small aperture – effectively a light-proof box with a small hole in one side. Light from a scene passes through this single point and projects an inverted image on the opposite side of the box...

or lens

Lens (optics)

A lens is an optical device with perfect or approximate axial symmetry which transmits and refracts light, converging or diverging the beam. A simple lens consists of a single optical element...

to project an image of the scene outside upside-down onto a viewing surface.

Scientist-monk Roger Bacon

Roger Bacon

Roger Bacon, O.F.M. , also known as Doctor Mirabilis , was an English philosopher and Franciscan friar who placed considerable emphasis on the study of nature through empirical methods...

also studied the matter. Bacon's notes and drawings, published as Perspectiva in 1267, are partly clouded with theological material describing how the Devil can insinuate himself through the pinhole by magic, and it is not clear whether or not he produced such a device. On 24 January 1544 mathematician and instrument maker Reiners Gemma Frisius

Gemma Frisius

Gemma Frisius , was a physician, mathematician, cartographer, philosopher, and instrument maker...

of Leuven University

Katholieke Universiteit Leuven

The Katholieke Universiteit Leuven is a Dutch-speaking university in Flanders, Belgium.It is located at the centre of the historic town of Leuven, and is a prominent part of the city, home to the university since 1425...

used one to watch a solar eclipse

Solar eclipse

As seen from the Earth, a solar eclipse occurs when the Moon passes between the Sun and the Earth, and the Moon fully or partially blocks the Sun as viewed from a location on Earth. This can happen only during a new moon, when the Sun and the Moon are in conjunction as seen from Earth. At least...

, publishing a diagram of his method in De Radio Astronimica et Geometrico in the following year. In 1558 Giovanni Batista della Porta was the first to recommend the method as an aid to drawing.

Before the invention of photographic processes there was no way to preserve the images produced by these cameras apart from manually tracing them. The earliest cameras were room-sized, with space for one or more people inside; these gradually evolved into more and more compact models such as that by Niépce's time portable handheld cameras suitable for photography were readily available. The first camera that was small and portable enough to be practical for photography was built by Johann Zahn

Johann Zahn

Johann Zahn was the seventeenth-century German author of Oculus Artificialis Teledioptricus Sive Telescopium...

in 1685, though it would be almost 150 years before such an application was possible.

Early fixed images

The first partially successful photograph

Photograph

A photograph is an image created by light falling on a light-sensitive surface, usually photographic film or an electronic imager such as a CCD or a CMOS chip. Most photographs are created using a camera, which uses a lens to focus the scene's visible wavelengths of light into a reproduction of...

of a camera image was made in approximately 1817 by Nicéphore Niépce

Nicéphore Niépce

Nicéphore Niépce March 7, 1765 – July 5, 1833) was a French inventor, most noted as one of the inventors of photography and a pioneer in the field.He is most noted for producing the world's first known photograph in 1825...

using a very small camera of his own making and a piece of paper coated with silver chloride, which darkened where it was exposed to light. No means of removing the remaining unaffected silver chloride was known to Niépce, so the photograph was not permanent, eventually becoming entirely darkened by the overall exposure to light necessary for viewing it. Later, in 1826, he used a sliding wooden box camera

Camera

A camera is a device that records and stores images. These images may be still photographs or moving images such as videos or movies. The term camera comes from the camera obscura , an early mechanism for projecting images...

made by Charles and Vincent Chevalier in Paris, France. He made his first permanent camera photograph in 1826 by coating a pewter

Pewter

Pewter is a malleable metal alloy, traditionally 85–99% tin, with the remainder consisting of copper, antimony, bismuth and lead. Copper and antimony act as hardeners while lead is common in the lower grades of pewter, which have a bluish tint. It has a low melting point, around 170–230 °C ,...

plate with bitumen and exposing the plate in this camera. The bitumen hardened where light struck. The unhardened areas were then dissolved away. This photograph still survives.

Daguerreotypes and calotypes

Louis Daguerre

Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre was a French artist and physicist, recognized for his invention of the daguerreotype process of photography.- Biography :...

and Joseph Nicéphore Niépce (who was Daguerre's partner, but died before their invention was completed) invented the first practical photographic method, which was named the daguerreotype, in 1836. Daguerre coated a copper plate with silver, then treated it with iodine vapor

Iodine

Iodine is a chemical element with the symbol I and atomic number 53. The name is pronounced , , or . The name is from the , meaning violet or purple, due to the color of elemental iodine vapor....

to make it sensitive to light. The image was developed by mercury vapor and fixed with a strong solution of ordinary salt (sodium chloride). William Fox Talbot perfected a different process, the calotype, in 1840. Both used cameras that were little different from Zahn's model, with a sensitized plate or sheet of paper placed in front of the viewing screen to record the image. Focusing was generally via sliding boxes.

Dry plates

Collodion dry plates

Collodion process

The collodion process is an early photographic process. It was introduced in the 1850s and by the end of that decade it had almost entirely replaced the first practical photographic process, the daguerreotype. During the 1880s the collodion process, in turn, was largely replaced by gelatin dry...

had been available since 1855, thanks to the work of Désiré van Monckhoven

Désiré van Monckhoven

Désiré Charles Emanuel van Monckhoven was a Belgian chemist, physicist, and photographic researcher. He was also an inventor and author. He wrote several of the earliest books on photography and photographic optics...

, but it was not until the invention of the gelatin

Gelatin

Gelatin is a translucent, colorless, brittle , flavorless solid substance, derived from the collagen inside animals' skin and bones. It is commonly used as a gelling agent in food, pharmaceuticals, photography, and cosmetic manufacturing. Substances containing gelatin or functioning in a similar...

dry plate in 1871 by Richard Leach Maddox that they rivalled wet plates in speed and quality. Also, for the first time, cameras could be made small enough to be hand-held, or even concealed. There was a proliferation of various designs, from single- and twin-lens reflexes to large and bulky field cameras, handheld cameras, and even cameras disguised as pocket watches, hats, or other objects.

The shortened exposure times that made candid photography possible also necessitated another innovation, the mechanical shutter

Shutter (photography)

In photography, a shutter is a device that allows light to pass for a determined period of time, for the purpose of exposing photographic film or a light-sensitive electronic sensor to light to capture a permanent image of a scene...

. The very first shutters were separate accessories, though built-in shutters were common by the turn of the century.

Kodak and the birth of film

The use of photographic film

Photographic film

was pioneered by George Eastman

George Eastman

George Eastman was an American innovator and entrepreneur who founded the Eastman Kodak Company and invented roll film, helping to bring photography to the mainstream...

, who started manufacturing paper film in 1885 before switching to celluloid

Celluloid

Celluloid is the name of a class of compounds created from nitrocellulose and camphor, plus dyes and other agents. Generally regarded to be the first thermoplastic, it was first created as Parkesine in 1862 and as Xylonite in 1869, before being registered as Celluloid in 1870. Celluloid is...

in 1889. His first camera, which he called the "Kodak," was first offered for sale in 1888. It was a very simple box camera

Box camera

The box camera is, with the exception of the pin hole camera, a camera in its simplest form. The form of the classic box camera is no more than a cardboard or plastic box with a lens in one end and film at the other. A simple box camera has only a single element meniscus fixed focus lens and...

with a fixed-focus lens and single shutter speed, which along with its relatively low price appealed to the average consumer. The Kodak came pre-loaded with enough film for 100 exposures and needed to be sent back to the factory for processing and reloading when the roll was finished. By the end of the 19th century Eastman had expanded his lineup to several models including both box and folding cameras.

In 1900, Eastman took mass-market photography one step further with the Brownie

Brownie (camera)

Brownie is the name of a long-running and extremely popular series of simple and inexpensive cameras made by Eastman Kodak. The Brownie popularized low-cost photography and introduced the concept of the snapshot. The first Brownie, introduced in February, 1900, was a very basic cardboard box camera...

, a simple and very inexpensive box camera that introduced the concept of the snapshot

Snapshot (photography)

A snapshot is popularly defined as a photograph that is "shot" spontaneously and quickly, most often without artistic or journalistic intent. Snapshots are commonly considered to be technically "imperfect" or amateurish—out of focus or poorly framed or composed...

. The Brownie was extremely popular and various models remained on sale until the 1960s.

Film also allowed the movie camera

Movie camera

The movie camera is a type of photographic camera which takes a rapid sequence of photographs on strips of film which was very popular for private use in the last century until its successor, the video camera, replaced it...

to develop from an expensive toy to a practical commercial tool.

Despite the advances in low-cost photography made possible by Eastman, plate cameras still offered higher-quality prints and remained popular well into the 20th century. To compete with rollfilm cameras, which offered a larger number of exposures per loading, many inexpensive plate cameras from this era were equipped with magazines to hold several plates at once. Special backs for plate cameras allowing them to use film packs or rollfilm were also available, as were backs that enabled rollfilm cameras to use plates.

Except for a few special types such as Schmidt camera

Schmidt camera

A Schmidt camera, also referred to as the Schmidt telescope, is a catadioptric astrophotographic telescope designed to provide wide fields of view with limited aberrations. Other similar designs are the Wright Camera and Lurie-Houghton telescope....

s, most professional astrograph

Astrograph

An astrograph is a telescope designed for the sole purpose of astrophotography. Astrographs are usually used in wide field surveys of the night sky as well as detection of objects such as asteroids, meteors, and comets.-Design:...

s continued to use plates until the end of the century when electronic photography replaced them.

35 mm

Oskar Barnack

Oskar Barnack was a German optical engineer, precision mechanic, industrial designer and the father of 35mm photography....

, who was in charge of research and development at Leitz

Leitz

The Esselte Leitz GmbH & Co KG, also Leitz, is a German manufacturer of office products. The company, which is headquartered in Stuttgart, is owned by Esselte since 1998. Today the brand Leitz is used by Esselte mainly for filing and workspace products....

, decided to investigate using 35 mm cine film for still cameras while attempting to build a compact camera capable of making high-quality enlargements. He built his prototype 35 mm camera (Ur-Leica) around 1913, though further development was delayed for several years by World War I. Leitz test-marketed the design between 1923 and 1924, receiving enough positive feedback that the camera was put into production as the Leica I (for Leitz camera) in 1925. The Leica's immediate popularity spawned a number of competitors, most notably the Contax

Contax

Contax was a camera brand noted for its unique technical innovation and a wide range of Zeiss lenses, noted for their high optical quality. Its final incarnation was a line of 35 mm, medium format and digital cameras engineered and manufactured by Kyocera, and featuring modern Zeiss optics...

(introduced in 1932), and cemented the position of 35 mm as the format of choice for high-end compact cameras.

Kodak got into the market with the Retina I

Kodak Retina

Retina was the name of a long-running series of German-built Kodak cameras. Retinas were manufactured in Stuttgart by Nagel Camerawerk, which Kodak had acquired in 1931, and sold under the Kodak nameplate. Retinas were noted for their compact size, quality, and low cost compared to their...

in 1934, which introduced the 135

135 film

The term 135 was introduced by Kodak in 1934 as a designation for cartridge film wide, specifically for still photography. It quickly grew in popularity, surpassing 120 film by the late 1960s to become the most popular photographic film format...

cartridge used in all modern 35 mm cameras. Although the Retina was comparatively inexpensive, 35 mm cameras were still out of reach for most people and rollfilm remained the format of choice for mass-market cameras. This changed in 1936 with the introduction of the inexpensive Argus A and to an even greater extent in 1939 with the arrival of the immensely popular Argus C3

Argus C3

The Argus C3 was a low-priced rangefinder camera mass-produced from 1939 to 1966 by Argus in Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA. The camera was the best-selling 35mm camera in the world for nearly three decades, and helped popularize the 35mm format...

. Although the cheapest cameras still used rollfilm, 35 mm film had come to dominate the market by the time the C3 was discontinued in 1966.

The fledgling Japanese camera industry began to take off in 1936 with the Canon

Canon Inc.

is a Japanese multinational corporation that specialises in the manufacture of imaging and optical products, including cameras, camcorders, photocopiers, steppers and computer printers. Its headquarters are located in Ōta, Tokyo, Japan.-Origins:...

35 mm rangefinder, an improved version of the 1933 Kwanon prototype. Japanese cameras would begin to become popular in the West after Korean War veterans and soldiers stationed in Japan brought them back to the United States and elsewhere.

TLRs and SLRs

The first practical reflex camera was the Franke & Heidecke

Rollei

Rollei is a German manufacturer of optical goods founded in 1920 by Paul Franke and Reinhold Heidecke in Braunschweig, Lower Saxony, and maker of the Rolleiflex and Rolleicord series of cameras...

Rolleiflex

Rolleiflex is the name of a long-running and diverse line of high-end cameras originally made by the German company Franke & Heidecke, and later Rollei-Werk. The "Rolleiflex" name is most commonly used to refer to Rollei's premier line of medium format twin lens reflex cameras...

medium format TLR

Twin-lens reflex camera

A twin-lens reflex camera is a type of camera with two objective lenses of the same focal length. One of the lenses is the photographic objective or "taking lens" , while the other is used for the viewfinder system, which is usually viewed from above at waist level...

of 1928. Though both single- and twin-lens reflex cameras had been available for decades, they were too bulky to achieve much popularity. The Rolleiflex, however, was sufficiently compact to achieve widespread popularity and the medium-format TLR design became popular for both high- and low-end cameras.

A similar revolution in SLR

Single-lens reflex camera

A single-lens reflex camera is a camera that typically uses a semi-automatic moving mirror system that permits the photographer to see exactly what will be captured by the film or digital imaging system, as opposed to pre-SLR cameras where the view through the viewfinder could be significantly...

design began in 1933 with the introduction of the Ihagee

Ihagee

Ihagee was a camera manufacturer based in Dresden, Germany. Its best-known product was the Exakta single-lens reflex camera.-History:Johan Steenbergen, a Dutchman, founded a camera company called Industrie- und Handelsgesellschaft in Dresden in 1912. The name was shortened to Ihagee...

Exakta

The Exakta is a pioneer brand camera produced by the Ihagee Kamerawerk in Dresden, Germany, founded as the Industrie und Handels-Gesellschaft mbH, in 1912.- Characteristics :Highlights of Exakta cameras include:...

, a compact SLR which used 127

127 film

127 is a film format for still photography. The image format is usually a square 4×4 cm, but rectangular 4×3 cm and 4×6 cm are also standard. Oddly, C. F. Foth & Co. used 36×24 mm for its first “Derby” model....

rollfilm. This was followed three years later by the first Western SLR to use 35mm film, the Kine Exakta (World's first true 35mm SLR was Soviet "Sport" camera, marketed several months before Kine Exakta, though "Sport" used its own film cartridge). The 35mm SLR design gained immediate popularity and there was an explosion of new models and innovative features after World War II. There were also a few 35mm TLRs, the best-known of which was the Contaflex of 1935, but for the most part these met with little success.

The first major post-war SLR innovation was the eye-level viewfinder, which first appeared on the Hungarian Duflex in 1947 and was refined in 1948 with the Contax

Contax

S, the first camera to use a pentaprism

Pentaprism

A pentaprism is a five-sided reflecting prism used to deviate a beam of light by 90°. The beam reflects inside the prism twice, allowing the transmission of an image through a right angle without inverting it as an ordinary right-angle prism or mirror would.The reflections inside the prism are not...

. Prior to this, all SLRs were equipped with waist-level focusing screens. The Duflex was also the first SLR with an instant-return mirror, which prevented the viewfinder from being blacked out after each exposure. This same time period also saw the introduction of the Hasselblad 1600F

Hasselblad

Victor Hasselblad AB is a Swedish manufacturer of medium-format cameras and photographic equipment based in Gothenburg, Sweden.The company is best known for the medium-format cameras it has produced since World War II....

, which set the standard for medium format SLRs for decades.

In 1952 the Asahi Optical Company

Pentax

Pentax is a brand name used by Hoya Corporation for its medical-related products & services and Pentax Ricoh Imaging Company for cameras, sport optics , etc. Hoya purchased and merged with the Japanese optics company on March 31, 2008. Hoya's Pentax imaging business was sold to Ricoh Company, Ltd...

(which later became well-known for its Pentax cameras) introduced the first Japanese SLR using 35mm film, the Asahiflex

Asahiflex

The Asahiflex was a 35mm single-lens reflex camera built by the Asahi Optical Corporation . It was the first SLR camera built in Japan....

. Several other Japanese camera makers also entered the SLR market in the 1950s, including Canon, Yashica

Yashica

Yashica was a Japanese manufacturer of cameras.-History:The company began in December, 1949 in Nagano, Japan, when the Yashima Seiki Company was founded with an initial investment of $566. Its eight employees originally manufactured components for electric clocks...

, and Nikon

Nikon

, also known as just Nikon, is a multinational corporation headquartered in Tokyo, Japan, specializing in optics and imaging. Its products include cameras, binoculars, microscopes, measurement instruments, and the steppers used in the photolithography steps of semiconductor fabrication, of which...

. Nikon's entry, the Nikon F

Nikon F

The Nikon F camera, introduced in 1959, was Nikon's first SLR camera. It was one of the most advanced cameras of its day. Although most of its concepts had already been introduced elsewhere, it was the first camera to combine them all in one camera. It was produced until October 1973 and was...

, had a full line of interchangeable components and accessories and is generally regarded as the first system camera

System camera

A system camera is a camera with interchangeable components that constitutes the core of a system. Early representatives include Leica I Schraubgewinde , Exakta and the Nikon F...

. It was the F, along with the earlier S series of rangefinder cameras, that helped establish Nikon's reputation as a maker of professional-quality equipment.

Instant cameras

While conventional cameras were becoming more refined and sophisticated, an entirely new type of camera appeared on the market in 1948. This was the Polaroid

Polaroid Corporation

Polaroid Corporation is an American-based international consumer electronics and eyewear company, originally founded in 1937 by Edwin H. Land. It is most famous for its instant film cameras, which reached the market in 1948, and continued to be the company's flagship product line until the February...

Model 95, the world's first viable instant-picture camera

Instant camera

The instant camera is a type of camera that generates a developed film image. The most popular types to use self-developing film were formerly made by Polaroid Corporation....

. Known as a Land Camera

Land Camera

Land cameras are instant cameras with self-developing film named after their inventor, Edwin Land, manufactured by Polaroid between the years of 1947 and 1983. Though Polaroid continued producing instant cameras after 1983, the name 'Land' was dropped from the camera name since Edwin Land retired...

after its inventor, Edwin Land, the Model 95 used a patented chemical process to produce finished positive prints from the exposed negatives in under a minute. The Land Camera caught on despite its relatively high price and the Polaroid lineup had expanded to dozens of models by the 1960s. The first Polaroid camera aimed at the popular market, the Model 20 Swinger

Polaroid Swinger

The Polaroid Model 20 "Swinger" was a popular Land Camera produced by the Polaroid Corporation between 1965 and 1970. At $19.95 USD it was the first truly inexpensive instant camera, a fact that helped fuel its enormous popularity and made it one of the top-selling cameras of all time...

of 1965, was a huge success and remains one of the top-selling cameras of all time.

Automation

The first camera to feature automatic exposure

Exposure (photography)

In photography, exposure is the total amount of light allowed to fall on the photographic medium during the process of taking a photograph. Exposure is measured in lux seconds, and can be computed from exposure value and scene luminance over a specified area.In photographic jargon, an exposure...

was the selenium

Selenium

Selenium is a chemical element with atomic number 34, chemical symbol Se, and an atomic mass of 78.96. It is a nonmetal, whose properties are intermediate between those of adjacent chalcogen elements sulfur and tellurium...

light meter

Light meter

A light meter is a device used to measure the amount of light. In photography, a light meter is often used to determine the proper exposure for a photograph...

-equipped, fully automatic Super Kodak Six-20 of 1938, but its extremely high price (for the time) of $225 ( in present terms) kept it from achieving any degree of success. By the 1960s, however, low-cost electronic components were commonplace and cameras equipped with light meters and automatic exposure systems became increasingly widespread.

The next technological advance came in 1960, when the German

Germany

Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...

Mec 16 SB

The MEC 16 SB is a German 16 mm subminiature camera launched in 1957 by Feinwerke Technik Gmbh Germany. The lens is a Rodenstock Heligon 1:2/22mm with diaphragm working on principle of "cat's pupil". The MEC 16 SB was designed by A. Armbruster...

subminiature became the first camera to place the light meter behind the lens

Photographic lens

A camera lens is an optical lens or assembly of lenses used in conjunction with a camera body and mechanism to make images of objects either on photographic film or on other media capable of storing an image chemically or electronically.While in principle a simple convex lens will suffice, in...

for more accurate metering. However, through-the-lens

Through-the-lens

Through-the-lens metering is a photographic term describing a feature of cameras capable of measuring light levels in a scene through their taking lenses, as opposed to a separate metering window...

metering ultimately became a feature more commonly found on SLRs than other types of camera; the first SLR equipped with a TTL system was the Topcon RE Super

Topcon

Topcon is a Japanese manufacturer of optical equipment for ophthalmology and surveying. Their headquarters are in Itabashi, Tokyo. They are affiliated with Toshiba, which holds 40% of Topcon's stock.-History of Topcon:...

of 1962.

Digital cameras

Digital cameras differ from their analog predecessors primarily in that they do not use film, but capture and save photographs on digital memory cards or internal storage instead. Their low operating costs have relegated chemical cameras to niche market

Niche market

A niche market is the subset of the market on which a specific product is focusing; therefore the market niche defines the specific product features aimed at satisfying specific market needs, as well as the price range, production quality and the demographics that is intended to impact...

s. Digital cameras now include wireless communication capabilities (for example Wi-Fi

Wi-Fi

Wi-Fi or Wifi, is a mechanism for wirelessly connecting electronic devices. A device enabled with Wi-Fi, such as a personal computer, video game console, smartphone, or digital audio player, can connect to the Internet via a wireless network access point. An access point has a range of about 20...

or Bluetooth

Bluetooth

Bluetooth is a proprietary open wireless technology standard for exchanging data over short distances from fixed and mobile devices, creating personal area networks with high levels of security...

) to transfer, print or share photos, and are commonly found on mobile phones

Camera phone

A camera phone is a mobile phone which is able to capture still photographs . Since early in the 21st century the majority of mobile phones in use are camera phones....

Early development

The concept of digitizing images on scanners, and the concept of digitizing video signals, predate the concept of making still pictures by digitizing signals from an array of discrete sensor elements. At Philips Labs. in New York, Edward Stupp, Pieter Cath and Zsolt Szilagyi filed for a
patent on "All Solid State Radiation Imagers" on 6 September 1968 and constructed a flat-screen
target for receiving and storing an optical image on a matrix composed of an array of photodiodes connected to a capacitor to form an array of two terminal devices connected in rows and columns. Their US patent was granted on 10 November 1970.
Texas Instruments engineer Willis Adcock

Willis Adcock

Dr. Willis Alfred Adcock was a Canadian-American physical chemist, electrical engineer, and university professor who worked on the first atomic bomb and assisted with the invention of the silicon transistor, as well as the integrated circuit...

designed a filmless camera that was not digital and applied for a patent in 1972, but it is not known whether it was ever built. The first recorded attempt at building a digital camera was in 1975 by Steven Sasson

Steven Sasson

Steven J. Sasson , is an American electrical engineer and the inventor of the digital camera. Sasson is a 1972 and 1973 graduate of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in electrical engineering.-Biography:...

, an engineer at Eastman Kodak. It used the then-new solid-state CCD image sensor

Image sensor

An image sensor is a device that converts an optical image into an electronic signal. It is used mostly in digital cameras and other imaging devices...

chips developed by Fairchild Semiconductor

Fairchild Semiconductor

Fairchild Semiconductor International, Inc. is an American semiconductor company based in San Jose, California. Founded in 1957, it was a pioneer in transistor and integrated circuit manufacturing...

in 1973. The camera weighed 8 pounds (3.6 kg), recorded black and white images to a cassette tape, had a resolution of 0.01 megapixels (10,000 pixels), and took 23 seconds to capture its first image in December 1975. The prototype camera was a technical exercise, not intended for production.

Analog electronic cameras

Handheld electronic cameras, in the sense of a device meant to be carried and used like a handheld film camera, appeared in 1981 with the demonstration of the Sony Mavica

Sony Mavica

Mavica was a brand of Sony cameras which used removable disks as the main recording media. In August, 1981, Sony announced the Sony Mavica electronic still camera, the first commercial electronic still camera. It was not a digital camera, as its CCD sensor produced an analog video signal in the...

(Magnetic Video Camera). This is not to be confused with the later cameras by Sony that also bore the Mavica name. This was an analog camera, in that it recorded pixel signals continuously, as videotape machines did, without converting them to discrete levels; it recorded television-like signals to a 2 × 2 inch "video floppy

Video Floppy

A Video Floppy is a analog recording storage medium in the form of a 2" magnetic floppy disk used to store still frames of composite analog video. A video floppy, also known as a VF disk, could store up to 25 frames either in the NTSC or PAL video standards, with each frame containing 2 fields of...

".
In essence it was a video movie camera that recorded single frames, 50 per disk in field mode and 25 per disk in frame mode. The image quality was considered equal to that of then-current televisions.
Analog electronic cameras do not appear to have reached the market until 1986 with the Canon RC-701. Canon demonstrated a prototype of this model at the 1984 Summer Olympics

1984 Summer Olympics

The 1984 Summer Olympics, officially known as the Games of the XXIII Olympiad, was an international multi-sport event held in Los Angeles, California, United States in 1984...

, printing the images in the Yomiuri Shimbun
Yomiuri Shimbun
The is a Japanese newspaper published in Tokyo, Osaka, Fukuoka, and other major Japanese cities. It is one of the five national newspapers in Japan; the other four are the Asahi Shimbun, the Mainichi Shimbun, Nihon Keizai Shimbun, and the Sankei Shimbun...

, a Japanese newspaper. In the United States, the first publication to use these cameras for real reportage was USA Today

USA Today

USA Today is a national American daily newspaper published by the Gannett Company. It was founded by Al Neuharth. The newspaper vies with The Wall Street Journal for the position of having the widest circulation of any newspaper in the United States, something it previously held since 2003...

, in its coverage of World Series baseball. Several factors held back the widespread adoption of analog cameras; the cost (upwards of $

United States dollar

The United States dollar , also referred to as the American dollar, is the official currency of the United States of America. It is divided into 100 smaller units called cents or pennies....

20,000), poor image quality compared to film, and the lack of quality affordable printers. Capturing and printing an image originally required access to equipment such as a frame grabber, which was beyond the reach of the average consumer. The "video floppy" disks later had several reader devices available for viewing on a screen, but were never standardized as a computer drive.

The early adopters tended to be in the news media, where the cost was negated by the utility and the ability to transmit images by telephone lines. The poor image quality was offset by the low resolution of newspaper graphics. This capability to transmit images without a satellite link was useful during the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989

Tiananmen Square protests of 1989

The Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, also known as the June Fourth Incident in Chinese , were a series of demonstrations in and near Tiananmen Square in Beijing in the People's Republic of China beginning on 15 April 1989...

and the first Gulf War

Gulf War

The Persian Gulf War , commonly referred to as simply the Gulf War, was a war waged by a U.N.-authorized coalition force from 34 nations led by the United States, against Iraq in response to Iraq's invasion and annexation of Kuwait.The war is also known under other names, such as the First Gulf...

in 1991.

US government agencies also took a strong interest in the still video concept, notably the US Navy for use as a real time air-to-sea surveillance system.

The first analog electronic camera marketed to consumers may have been the Canon RC-250 Xapshot in 1988. A notable analog camera produced the same year was the Nikon QV-1000C, designed as a press camera and not offered for sale to general users, which sold only a few hundred units. It recorded images in greyscale, and the quality in newspaper print was equal to film cameras. In appearance it closely resembled a modern digital single-lens reflex camera

Single-lens reflex camera

. Images were stored on video floppy disks.

Silicon Film, a proposed digital sensor cartridge for film cameras that would allow 35 mm cameras to take digital photographs without modification was announced in late 1998. Silicon Film was to work like a roll of 35 mm film, with a 1.3 megapixel sensor behind the lens and a battery and storage unit fitting in the film holder in the camera. The product, which was never released, became increasingly obsolete due to improvements in digital camera technology and affordability. Silicon Films' parent company filed for bankruptcy in 2001.

The arrival of true digital cameras

The first true digital camera that recorded images as a computerized file was likely the Fuji

Fujifilm

is a multinational photography and imaging company headquartered in Tokyo, Japan.Fujifilm's principal activities are the development, production, sale and servicing of color photographic film, digital cameras, photofinishing equipment, color paper, photofinishing chemicals, medical imaging...

DS-1P of 1988, which recorded to a 16 MB internal memory card that used a battery to keep the data in memory. This camera was never marketed in the United States, and has not been confirmed to have shipped even in Japan.

The first commercially available digital camera was the 1990 Dycam Model 1; it also sold as the Logitech

Logitech

Logitech International S.A. is a global provider of personal peripherals for computers and other digital platforms headquartered in Romanel-sur-Morges, Switzerland. The company develops and markets products like peripheral devices for PCs, including keyboards, mice, microphones, game controllers...

Fotoman. It used a CCD image sensor

Image sensor

An image sensor is a device that converts an optical image into an electronic signal. It is used mostly in digital cameras and other imaging devices...

, stored pictures digitally, and connected directly to a computer for download.

In 1991, Kodak brought to market the Kodak DCS-100

Kodak DCS-100

The Kodak Professional Digital Camera System or DCS, was the first commercially available DSLR camera. It was mounted on a Nikon F3 body and released by Kodak in May 1991 after previously shown at Photokina in 1990...

, the beginning of a long line of professional Kodak DCS

Kodak DCS

The Kodak Digital Camera System is a series of digital single-lens reflex cameras and digital camera backs that were released by Kodak in the 1990s and 2000s, and discontinued in 2005. They were all based on existing 35mm film SLRs from Nikon and Canon...

SLR cameras that were based in part on film bodies, often Nikons. It used a 1.3 megapixel sensor and was priced at $13,000.

The move to digital formats was helped by the formation of the first JPEG

JPEG

In computing, JPEG . The degree of compression can be adjusted, allowing a selectable tradeoff between storage size and image quality. JPEG typically achieves 10:1 compression with little perceptible loss in image quality....

and MPEG standards in 1988, which allowed image and video files to be compressed for storage. The first consumer camera with a liquid crystal display on the back was the Casio

Casio

is a multinational electronic devices manufacturing company founded in 1946, with its headquarters in Shibuya, Tokyo, Japan. Casio is best known for its electronic products, such as calculators, audio equipment, PDAs, cameras, musical instruments, and watches...

QV-10 in 1995, and the first camera to use CompactFlash

CompactFlash

CompactFlash is a mass storage device format used in portable electronic devices. Most CompactFlash devices contain flash memory in a standardized enclosure. The format was first specified and produced by SanDisk in 1994...

was the Kodak DC-25 in 1996.

The marketplace for consumer digital cameras was originally low resolution (either analog or digital) cameras built for utility. In 1997 the first megapixel cameras for consumers were marketed. The first camera that offered the ability to record video

Video

Video is the technology of electronically capturing, recording, processing, storing, transmitting, and reconstructing a sequence of still images representing scenes in motion.- History :...

clips may have been the Ricoh RDC-1 in 1995.

1999 saw the introduction of the Nikon D1

Nikon D1

The Nikon D1 is a digital single-lens reflex camera introduced on June 15, 1999. It featured a 2.7 megapixel image sensor, 4.5 frames per second continuous shooting, and accepted the full range of Nikon F-mount lenses...

, a 2.74 megapixel camera that was the first digital SLR developed entirely by a major manufacturer, and at a cost of under $6,000 at introduction was affordable by professional photographers and high-end consumers. This camera also used Nikon F-mount lenses, which meant film photographers could use many of the same lenses they already owned.

External links

Victorian Detective Camera Patents

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Camera obscura

Early fixed images

Daguerreotypes and calotypes

Dry plates

Kodak and the birth of film

35 mm

TLRs and SLRs

Instant cameras

Automation

Digital cameras

Early development

Analog electronic cameras

The arrival of true digital cameras

See also

External links