Photos: The history of the digital camera

The analogue age
Analogue cameras may have been the start of the digital age, in that they recorded images on to electronic media, but they never really took off due to poor image quality and prohibitive cost. They were mainly used by newspapers to cover events such as the 1984 Olympics, the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 and the Gulf War in 1991. Canon launched the first analogue camera to go on sale, the RC-701, in 1986, and followed it with the RC-250 Xapshot, the first consumer analogue camera, in 1988.

The Xapshot was called the Ion in Europe, and the Q-PIC in Japan. It cost $499 in the US, but consumers had to splash out a further $999 on a battery, computer interface card with software, and floppy disks. Think about that the next time you get annoyed when you have to pay extra for memory cards.