Sasson's digital camera
December 1975 (Kodak, Rochester)
A Kodak engineer built a toaster-sized prototype that recorded a 100 × 100 pixel black-and-white image onto cassette tape in 23 seconds. It was the first self-contained digital camera.
How it began
In 1975 Steven Sasson, a young engineer at Kodak, was asked to see whether the new CCD chip could be used to capture images. He built a camera from a movie-camera lens, a Fairchild CCD, digital circuits and a portable cassette recorder.
How it works
The CCD captured a 100 × 100 pixel black-and-white image. Circuits converted each pixel’s charge into a number and wrote the numbers onto ordinary cassette tape, which took 23 seconds. A separate playback unit read the tape and showed the picture on a television set.
Why it mattered
It was the first camera that captured, digitised and stored an image entirely electronically, without film. Kodak patented it but did not turn it into a product: its business was film. Two decades later the digital cameras its prototype foretold would overtake film, and Kodak’s film business shrank sharply.
Limits and what replaced it
At 0.01 megapixels and 3.6 kg it was a proof of concept. Megapixel sensors (Kodak, 1986), professional digital SLRs from 1991 and consumer cameras in the mid-1990s made the idea practical.
Today
The prototype is in the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History; digital cameras outsell film cameras by an overwhelming margin.