The World's First Digital Camera

Born in 1975, the world's first digital camera used a standard cassette tape to record images, rather than today's standard data cards.

Vintage 1975 portable all electronic still camera

Via Kodak, Steve Sasson, the inventor of the digital camera, describes it's inception:

"In December of 1975, after a year of piecing together a bunch of new technology in a back lab at the Elmgrove Plant in Rochester, we were ready to try it. 'It' being a rather odd-looking collection of digital circuits that we desperately tried to convince ourselves was a portable camera. 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..."

Side-by-side comparison – Hardcopy vs. Film-less Photography

Read the whole story at Kodak.