Digital Camera
About a year ago I purchased my very first digital camera. The digital camera is by far very different from the analog camera that I used to have when I was a kid. The analog camera used film that you had to advance to take the next picture and you also had to worry about the flash. The digital camera captures the photograph and saves it on a digital memory card. The biggest difference from the digital camera and the analog camera is that you can see your picture immediately after taking the picture. The analog camera you had to wait until you developed the film to see the results.
“The first recorded attempt at building a digital camera was in 1975 by Steven Sasson, an engineer at Eastman Kodak. It used the then-new solid-state CCD (charged coupled device) image sensor chips developed by Fairchild Semiconductor in 1973. The camera weighed 8 pounds (3.6 kg) recorded black and white images to a cassette tape, had a resolution of 0.01 megapixels (10,000 pixels), and took 23 seconds to capture its first image. This prototype was a technical exercise not intended for production.” Digital cameras have become very compact and stylish, since the prototype.
In the mid 1980’s Kodak was the first to develop a 5x7-inch digital photo quality print from the megapixel sensor, capable of recording 1.4 million pixels. They also produced the Photo CD System and released the first professional digital cameras for professional photographers. The Digital camera became available to the common consumer in 1994 that worked with a home computer connected by a cable.
Several other companies were also getting on the digital bandwagon with Kodak were Apple and Olympus. Apple developed the “Quick Take 100, a color digital camera with a 640 x 480 pixel CCD, and a fixed-focused 50mm lens. The Quick Take 100 could only store 8 images on its internal memory.”