Bits Pics: Kodak’s 1975 Model Digital Camera

Kodak

It might not be pretty on the eyes, or easy to carry around on a vacation, but what do you expect? It was the first digital camera Kodak ever made.

Yes, that’s right, the contraption pictured above was put together in Kodak’s Elmgrove Plant labs near Rochester, N.Y., during the winter of 1975.

A post on Kodak’s Web site from 2007, written by Steve Sasson, the inventor of the digital camera, explains exactly how this camera was created, from a mishmash of lenses and computer parts and an old Super 8 movie camera.

Mr. Sasson called it “film-less photography” and took a “year of piecing together a bunch of new technology” to create a digital camera that ran off “16 nickel-cadmium batteries, a highly temperamental new type of CCD imaging area array, an a/d converter implementation stolen from a digital voltmeter.”

One of my favorite factoids about this snazzy digital camera is the fact that it took 23 seconds to record a single digital image to its cassette deck. To view the filmless photo, Mr. Sasson had to remove the cassette from the camera and place it in a customized reader that could display the image on an old black and white television.

When the team of technicians presented the camera to Kodak audiences they of course heard a barrage of curious questions:

Why would anyone ever want to view his or her pictures on a 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?

And although Mr. Sasson and his team tried to answer some of these questions, he concludes with the statement that the digital camera they created could “substantially impact the way pictures will be taken in the future.”

Kodak Side-by-side comparison of a printed photograph versus the “Film-less Photograph.”