Photos: The history of the digital camera

Chris at LGFri 2 November, 2007 11:56am

This is a great post - we've linked to it on our own blog. One thing that puzzles me, though - what was the first picture taken on a digital/electronic camera? Does anyone have any idea? It's a bit of history that surely should be preserved, if it still exists.

AnonymousFri 2 November, 2007 12:25pm

Thanks, Chris, that's a good point. You'd have to ask Steve Sasson what happened to that first picture, but we do know that a fellow lab assistant posed, and the first picture was partially blurred by static. A quick switch of some wires and another twenty-three second wait sorted things out.

AnonymousSat 3 November, 2007 6:44am

Please break this article up into even more little tiny pages in a vain attempt to increase your ad views (I use and highly recommend Adblock Plus). Instead of using a whole one, maybe one-half of a paragraph per page would be perfect!

AnonymousSat 3 November, 2007 5:39pm

Mosaic wasn't a "photo browser" - it was the first Web browser.

Barrie O. WardSat 3 November, 2007 7:10pm

Interesting but a very "Thin" article .... You really should have posted it over considerably less web pages as the cyle was rather annoying to say the least.

Harvard IrvingSun 4 November, 2007 1:09am

The article says (page 5):

"the H-Pro, an SLR design with an LCD viewfinder,"

That doesn't make sense. If it is an SLR, why would it use an LCD viewfinder? An SLR has a mirror and pentaprism which allows you to look through the lens optically. If the viewfinder is an LCD, this implies that there is no mirror, and the CCD is directly exposed to the lens. This would make it a "TTL" (Through the Lens) design - much like a video camera which relays the image to an electronic viewfinder.

If it were an SLR with an LCD viewfinder, that would be very strange - it would mean the design had two CCD units - one to take the picture, and one that looks through the mirror to provide the image for the viewfinder. But why would anyone design it that way? It would be cheaper and optically superior simply to have the user look directly through the lens without going through a CCD/LCD combo.

AnonymousSun 4 November, 2007 3:03am

Not only was Mosaic the first Webbrowser (if you don't want to count Lynx) instead of a Photobrowser, it was utterly incapable of displaying images. A hack enabled it to open a pictureviewer (xv mostly) if you click on an image. On some Unix systems one was able to embed the opening window with the image back into the browser-window, which gave a feeling as we know today.

bowerockSun 4 November, 2007 8:19pm

Ok, this article was pretty good. But what about an historic little device called the Game Boy Camera? That was my favorite digital camera of all time.

Richard TrenholmMon 5 November, 2007 3:24pm

Thanks for the feedback, folks! The first web browser was WorldWideWeb, developed by Tim Berners-Lee in late 1990 -- Wikipedia says it was Cello, but we won't argue with TBL. Mosaic popularised the internet browsing experience by allowing users to see pictures, albeit by clicking a link to the image. Meanwhile the Canon official 'Camera Museum' site entry for the Colani Hy-Pro concept states that "the viewfinder is an LCD display", but we suspect that this may be an electronic viewfinder (EVF) like on some superzooms, or perhaps even an early implementation of live view as seen on today's entry level DSLRs.

AnonymousTue 6 November, 2007 7:15pm

Who wrote this article?

Sean CallahanTue 6 November, 2007 8:30pm

In 1988, two years prior to the release of Photoshop, The Avalon Development Group of Cambridge, MA (USA) introduced PhotoMac, the first color image manipulation program for the Macintosh. It supported a 256-color monitor and appeared about the time of the Mac II, the first consumer level personal computer to process and display color images.

Jamie FentonTue 6 November, 2007 11:13pm

A "web camera" four years before Logitech. A group of engineers at Farallon Computing built an early networked camera device based on the image sensor used in the PX-2000 camcorder (which recorded video on an audio cassette running several times faster than normal). The pixels flowed into the Macintosh serial port at something like 230Kbps, resulting in jaggies galore. The lead SW engineer was David Allen, formerly of IBM. The concept was based on Farallon's popular MacRecorder audio digitizer - and had the "eyeball with a long cord" form factor that is common today.

AnonymousFri 9 November, 2007 12:02am

Who the hell wrote this? Obviously not someone who has any ability to crawl out from beneath the rock they live under. This article is so badly written and researched that I will certainly have to ingest some rather powerful and extremely illegal recreational chemicals to find a reason to ever believe that anything published by cnet has any credibility if this is an example of the standard. As such, there is no reason for me to ever return for the kind of pap that I have just seen passed off as a 'history' of digital photography.

Richard TrenholmFri 9 November, 2007 1:49pm

Thanks for the further constructive criticism, folks. As Sean correctly points out, Digital Darkroom was greyscale only and PhotoMac was indeed the first colour image manipulation program. We highlighted the launch of Photoshop because of its continued importance. As Jamie Fenton points out, the Logitech VideoMan wasn't the first webcam, but we included it as the first colour digital video camera for consumer computers. I will now return to under my rock.

Tom GilleyFri 9 November, 2007 4:31pm

Fenton! wow a blast from the past... So, to add more junk; IN mid/late 80's Apple ATG worked with Fuji, Zoran, and Toshiba on a digital camera system for educational applications (Tyler Peppel, Albert Chu). The costs was prohibitive. ATG began an engineering project with Sanyo on a low cost digital camera based a new Sanyo full frame transfer CCD; code name "papaya". There is a picture of Sculley holding a working prototype in Time Mag. The guy that worked on that is still at Apple (call him dude). That project was canceled due to interesting Apple/Kodak dealings... Apple also funded some very early CMOS hack out of Scotland around that time. The Scotland Hack was not that different from the pop the top off the chip (yes back then you could do that) photo sensitive RAM stuff in the early 80's. Steve Ciarcia wrote a BYTE article about a RAM camera HACK. After that article a Apple II was networked on corvus network for government lab monitoring.

AnonymousTue 20 November, 2007 12:17pm

For a book I am writing I need to know if there were any digital telephone cameras available in 1991 0 1992. If so when. If no what digital cameras were available on those dates. Can anyone help,please?

dennis clarksonTue 20 November, 2007 12:22pm

Sorry about the anonymouse a mistake. The question above relates to the UK only

AnonymousMon 25 February, 2008 7:24pm

this website is unusefull to my project

AnonymousMon 25 February, 2008 7:26pm

get a life whoever made this website!

AnonymousThu 28 February, 2008 7:50pm

Alguém pode traduzir esta página para o português por favor?
eu preciso muito! é um trabalho de aula! por favor me ajudem!