Digital Camera History Just how and when did all this digital camera stuff start?

The technology used by a digital camera was first developed by the Television industry back in 1951. TV shows started out in two formats, one was live and the other was recording on film (like movies) to be shown later. Bing Crosby laboratories developed a method to record images using digital electrical impulses on magnetic tape which was a lot cheaper than recording on film. This was the beginning of the digital camera technology we use today.

This technology was continually improved and adopted in the early 1960s by the government to use with satellites that monitored other countries (as in spy satellites). In the quest for better resolution and details the government steadily increased the abilities of this digital technology. By the late 1960s they had developed methods to increase the resolution and detail to very acceptable levels.

Texas Instruments is credited with the first patent on a digital electronic camera that used no film in 1971. During the 1970s NASA jumped into the technology and started increasing the number of pixels which set the stage for the consumer versions of digital cameras soon to come. The magic number of pixels that made photos that could be viewed on a computer screen was 800 X 800. This was the last piece of the puzzle that motivated the big film and traditional camera manufacturers to create the first consumer digital camera models.

It was in 1981 that Sony introduced their first still video camera, the Mavica (Magnetic Video Camera). It was the first consumer digital  electronic camera released and had 0.3 megapixels. Technically the Mavica was not a digital camera but was a still analog version of the video cameras of that period.  The low resolution was OK for viewing on a computer but not to print out due to the printers available and of course the lower resolution in print made the photos too small for most consumers.

There were really two areas that were important in the development of the digital cameras, the light sensors and image format and storage. In the early 1990s both Kodak and Sony continued to push the envelope and get better sensors and higher pixel count images as a result. Other camera manufacturers like Olympus, Fuji, Nikon, and Canon kept leapfrogging each other in more sophisticated and higher resolution in both still and video digital cameras.

In the late 1990s HP jumped into the fray with increasing the print quality of their inkjet printers and now a consumer could print out the high resolution images recorded on their digital cameras. Of course HP came out with a complete line of digital cameras to complement their new printers.

All of sudden film and continuous tone prints took a definite backseat to their digital counterparts. Since 2000 digital cameras have evolved beyond what traditional film could handle and of course memory and monitors have increase in capability and dropped dramatically in price. So after 150 years of film and continuous tone prints, you can hardly find either in the marketplace today.

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