Vapourware: The tech that never was

EFS
The Electronic Film System (EFS) was developed by Silicon Film Technologies just before the turn of the millennium. It allowed photographers to turn an ordinary 35mm SLR film camera into a fully featured digital camera for around $700 (£350). At the time digital camera optics weren't able to reproduce the image quality of a decent SLR, but was probably only ever going to act as an interim solution until digital imaging developed further (no pun intended).

The EFS 'film' was a single object that was exactly the same size as a roll of 35mm film, including the small amount of film between the film's casing and the winding unit on the right-hand side of the camera. This unit sat in the film cavity on an SLR camera and captured digital images from the light entering the camera's lens as normal. In theory, it was a superb idea. It gave you a 'digital negative' that could be plugged into a PC with a special piece of hardware.

The digital film had just 48MB of internal memory, and a 1.3-megapixel image would take about 2MB of this memory. So while this made digital imaging a little more attractive, 24 photos per 'film' is a far cry from what became available only a short time later as dSLRs took off. That said, you could always offload data to an external unit and reuse the 'film'.

The initiative was canned in September 2001 after having its funding cut off.

As a matter of fact...
In 1999, when the Silicon Film was being demonstrated, Nikon's 2.7-megapixel D1 was released, and was the first digital SLR to be made by a mainstream camera manufacturer. It cost $6,000 (£3,000).