ChApter 1. digitAl CAmerAs & imAges
12 For more on textbooks in digitAl photogrAphy, visit http://www.photoCourse.Com
Digital Photography—The Past and the Future...1
It was not that long ago, around 1995, when many of us first became aware
of digital photography. That was the year when Apple’s QuickTake 100 and
Kodak’s DC40 both broke the sub-$1000 barrier for digital cameras. These
filmless cameras captured very small images, but they were immediate
hits. Small businesses, realtors, insurance agents, and other early adopters
snapped them up. They were so popular that the early models were soon fol-
lowed by a steady stream of digital cameras from Casio, Sony, Olympus and
others. The race was on and the stream of new cameras not only continues,
it accelerates. Things have advanced so far that the same money that would
have bought one of those early cameras will now buy one that captures im-
ages 20 times larger and has many more features such as video, sound, and
professional style controls.
These early consumer cameras weren’t developed in isolation. Professional
cameras, based on film cameras but with image sensors added to capture
digital images, were growing in popularity among professionals. However,
their high prices, often $20,000 or more, made these cameras available only
to an elite few. Kodak had also already introduced the Photo CD so photog-
raphers could have their slides and negatives inexpensively scanned into a
digital format. The process caught on with professionals, but not with ama-
teurs as Kodak had hoped. Meanwhile, publishing, advertising, medicine, and
many other fields were going digital. Digital images slipped easily into this
trend because they could be instantly displayed, e-mailed, and inserted into
documents. It was professionals who led the change from film to digital, but it
wasn’t long before many more of us were headed in the same direction. Film
is no longer just a mature industry, it’s dying. Given the scale of this change,
how did it all come to pass?
If there were ever two inventors who haven’t received the public credit they
deserve, it’s George Smith and Willard Boyle, co-inventors of the charge-
coupled device (CCD) at Bell Labs. At the time they were attempting to create
a new kind of semiconductor memory for computers. A secondary consider-
ation was the need to develop solid-state cameras for use in video telephone
service. In the space of an hour on October 17, 1969, they sketched out theThis illustration shows
the relative sizes of
photos captured by the
first digital cameras
(small) and by more
recent models (large).
The Canon EOS DCS
3 digital camera was
introduced in July 1995
and captured images
containing 1.3 million
pixels. It cost about
$17,000.
The Canon PowerShot
600 digital camera
was introduced in July
1996 and captured
images containing 500
thousand pixels. It was
priced just over $1000.
Willard Boyle (left) and
George Smith (right).
Courtesy of Lucent
Technologies.