Steven Sasson & the digital camera

In 1975 Steven Sasson invented the digital camera (see link below).   

Steven Sasson & his digital camera

photo by Steve Kelly

Sasson, was an engineer at Eastman Kodak at the time when he invented and built the first electronic camera using a charge-coupled device image sensor in 1975. It weighed 8 pounds (3.6 kg) and had only 0.01 megapixels. The image was recorded onto a cassette tape and this process took 23 seconds. The camera only took images in black and white. To play back images, data was read from the tape and then displayed on a television set. Needless to say, his invention revolutionized photography and The medium would never be the same.   

digital camera prototype developed for

Eastman Kodak

Sasson said, "It had a lens that we took from a used parts bin from the Super 8 movie camera production line downstairs from our little lab on the second floor in Bldg 4. On the side of our portable contraption, we shoehorned in a portable digital cassette instrumentation recorder. Add to that 16 nickel cadmium batteries, a highly temperamental new type of CCD imaging area array, an a/d converter implementation stolen from a digital voltmeter application, several dozen digital and analog circuits all wired together on approximately half a dozen circuit boards, and you have our interpretation of what a portable all electronic still camera might look like."       

On November 17, 2009, U.S. President Barack Obama awarded Sasson the National Medal of Technology and Innovation at a ceremony in the East Room of the White House. This is the highest honor awarded by the US government to scientists, engineers, and inventors.

left: Steven Sasson                 right: President Barack Obama   

photographer unknown

On the 6th of September, 2012, The Royal Photographic Society awarded Sasson its Progress medal and Honorary Fellowship in recognition of any invention, research, publication or other contribution that has resulted in an important advance in the scientific or technological development of photography or imaging in the widest sense.


Leica Camera AG honored Sasson by presenting to him a limited edition 18-megapixel Leica M9 Titanium camera (engraved with the serial number = 4,000,000) during Photokina 2010.

Links to more info about Steven Sassn 
                   and the digital camera:
    
Birth of the digital camera             

Wikipedia             

The Dawn of Digital Photography     

Sasson speakes about how he invented the digital camera video              
      

        

Styrous® ~ July 4, 2015

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Birth of the digital camera

Steven Sasson & his digital camera

Forty years ago, in 1975, Steven Sasson invented the digital camera. True, it was a bit unwieldy, but needless to say, eventually his invention revolutionized photography profoundly and photography would never be the same. 

Sasson was working at Eastman Kodak at the time. The original camera weighed 8 pounds (3.6 kg) and had only 0.01 megapixels. The image was recorded onto a cassette tape and the process took 23 seconds. His camera only took images in black and white.  

To make the camera a reality, he used a charge-coupled device (CCD) image sensor which was invented in 1969 at AT&T Bell Labs by Willard Boyle and George E. Smith. The concept was similar in principle to the bucket-brigade device (BBD), which was developed at Philips Research Labs during the late 1960s. Earlier versions used a camera tube; later ones digitized the signal. Early uses were mainly military and scientific; followed by medical and news applications.   

The first working CCD made with integrated circuit technology was a simple 8-bit shift register. This device had input and output circuits and was used to demonstrate its use as a shift register and as a crude eight pixel linear imaging device. 

In a CCD for capturing images, there is a photoactive region (an epitaxial layer of silicon), and a transmission region made out of a shift register (the CCD, properly speaking).

CCD

An image is projected through a lens onto the capacitor array (the photoactive region), causing each capacitor to accumulate an electric charge proportional to the light intensity at that location. A one-dimensional array, used in line-scan cameras, captures a single slice of the image, whereas a two-dimensional array, used in video and still cameras, captures a two-dimensional picture corresponding to the scene projected onto the focal plane of the sensor. Once the array has been exposed to the image, a control circuit causes each capacitor to transfer its contents to its neighbor (operating as a shift register). The last capacitor in the array dumps its charge into a charge amplifier, which converts the charge into a voltage. By repeating this process, the controlling circuit converts the entire contents of the array in the semiconductor to a sequence of voltages. In a digital device, these voltages are then sampled, digitized, and usually stored in memory; in an analog device (such as an analog video camera), they are processed into a continuous analog signal (e.g. by feeding the output of the charge amplifier into a low-pass filter), which is then processed and fed out to other circuits for transmission, recording, or other processing. 

However, after all is said and done, to know the nuts and bolts of how a digital camera works is of no concern to the modern day user. It's like the computer; you don't really have to know how it works to make the most of it.  

Thanks, Steven!

Styrous® ~ June 7, 2015

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