A History of Digital Photography

This article about digital photography is appealing for those interested about this topic is written by Dawn Smith

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The History Of Digital Photography started back in 1969 when George Smith and Willard Boyle invented the charge-coupled device (CCD). The CCD is at the heart of modern digital cameras as this is the image sensor. But similar to a lot of other great inventions, the two scientists didn't plan it this way. In 1970, Smith and Boyle manged to built the CCD into the world's first solid-state video camera. In 1975, they demonstrated the first CCD camera with image quality sharp enough for broadcast television.

But it wasn't until 1981 when the world famous Sony Corporation produced the first prototype digital camera, called Mavica (Magnetic Video Camera). Mavica was an electronic still camera, which recorded images as magnetic impulses on a compact two-inch still-video floppy disk. The images were saved on the disk using two CCD chips.

The first digital cameras for mass production that worked with a home computer via a serial cable were the Apple QuickTake 100 camera (relased on February 17 , 1994), the Kodak DC40 camera (March 28, 1995), the Casio QV-11 (with LCD monitor, late 1995), and Sony's Cyber-Shot Digital Still Camera (1996). But it was Kodak that entered into an aggressive co-marketing campaign to promote the DC40 and to help introduce the idea of digital photography for the masses. Kinko's and Microsoft both partnered with Kodak to produce digital image-making software workstations and kiosks which allowed customers to produce Photo CD Discs and photographs, and add digital images to documents.

IBM worked in association with Kodak in the creation of an internet-based network image exchange. Hewlett-Packard was the first company to make color inkjet printers that complemented the new digital camera images and this is when digital really began to take over.

The first truly digital camera that was able to store images as a computerized file was the Fuji DS-1P of 1988, which recorded to a 16 MB internal memory chip that used a battery to store the data in memory. However, this particular model was never sold in the United States, and has not been confirmed to have shipped even in Japan. Hence, the position of first commercially available digital camera should be given to the 1990 Dycam Model 1 - it also sold as the Logitech Fotoman. It used a CCD image sensor, stored pictures digitally, and connected directly to a PC for download. Everything the home Photographer needed at their fingertips.

The history of digital photography tells us that the future is digital and statistics confirm this

In 2006, 34.6 billion images were printed or stored in Western Europe. Sales for film based cameras have dwindled are populated mostly by hardcore enthusiasts.