In 2006, 34.6 billion digital images were printed or stored in Western Europe & in 2009 this figure is predicted to grow to a staggering 85.3 billion images. A premium quality photo is now easily printed at home in less than a minute. The most amazing part is that we can do all of this at home and even without a computer. The move towards photo-labs for the home has played a major role in getting people more involved. You don’t need to be an expert or spend hours producing a photo, as Niépce had to do only 180 years ago. There is no doubt that Joseph Niépce would have been amazed to see how easily we now obtain our photos”. To capture the world’s first permanent image, Niépce set up a camera obscura and placed within it a pewter plate coated with bitumen of Judea. After more tha
n eight hours exposure time, the image was made visible on the plate after developing it with a mixture of lavender oil and white petroleum, which dissolved away the parts of the bitumen that had not been hardened by light. Since Niépce’s success, there have been countless others who have paved the way for what we know as photography .The 1830’s brought with it Louis Daguerre and the Daguerreotype. Using a process that produced images on silver-plated copper plate. By 1840 William Fox Talbot had revealed his own process to develop a photo, using paper sheets with silver chloride that could produce positive prints. His ideas were later refined and by 1901 and the chemical photography was established. Black and white output was mainly used until 1935 when the first modern colour film was launched and access to photography grew from professional customers to the consumer. It was 55 years later (1990), the DCS 100 camera launched for the professional customer and marks the milestone of the first digital camera.
History of digital photography & the space race!
You may be surprised to learn that the origins of digital photography lie as far back as the 1950s. Yes, it’s the time of the, the cold war and the space race! Why was the space race important to the history of digital photography? Well, very early on politicians on both sides of the cold war realized that if a satellite could be launched into space it could carry a c
amera. With a camera on board it could spy on the enemy. The problem of course was this – there are no film developers in space! Taking pictures on film meant you had bring the film back to Earth somehow and if it didn’t make it back to Earth – no pictures at all! So a new system was invented that didn’t need film.Digital cameras were the answer. They could record photographs and ‘beam’ the digital signal back to Earth. The signal was then decoded and the image could be viewed. This then is clearly a big development in the history of digital photography.
Coming a few years down the lane, in the 1960's NASA converted analog signals to digital signals with their space probes to map the surface of the moon that was sending digital images back to earth. Even spy satellites used by many governments of different countries used this same technology for digital photography. This was a somewhat real implementation in the area of digital technology and digital camera technology as well. However the real birth of a technology is when it reaches out to the hands of the common man! In the year 1972, a film free electronic camera was invented and patented by Texas Instruments. Following the exploits of digital cameras in space, the concept of photography without film came back to Earth in 1973. An engineer, Steven Sasson, working for Kodak used a CCD to produce a digital image. This camera weighed in at a hefty 8 pounds. And it only had 0.1 megapixels - not really designed for the consumer then!
To be fair, it was experimental rather than commercial. Importantly though it truly was a digital camera in the way we are familiar, because it recorded images onto a solid chip (CCD) rather than onto tape.Clearly more development was needed. At this point people were beginning to realise that digital cameras may have a use back here on Earth.
You may ask where does the history of digital photography really start ? Looking at various historical overviews, it quickly becomes clear that the starting point depends quite a bit on your point of view...
Digital cameras use image sensors instead of film to sample light. They do this due to photoelectric effect in which some metals release electrons when exposed to light. You could probably argue that Albert Einstein - who won the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the photoelectric effect - got the ball rolling in the history of digital photography!
Often incorporated into the history of digital photography, is the camera designed by Texas Instruments Inc. in 1972. However, this camera was not digital, but an analog-based, film-less device.
The next step in the history of digital photography came in 1972, when Steven Sasson of Kodak was instructed by his supervisor to try and find a way to build a camera using solid-state image sensors. These chips use photosensitive diodes called photosites to record light.
An important marker in the history of digital photography was when Sasson snapped the first digital picture in December 1975. According to Sasson the image took 23 seconds to record onto the cassette, and then another 23 seconds to read off a playback unit onto a television.
However, no consumer camera was released at that stage by the company. Later, in 1986, Kodak invented the world's first megapixel sensor, capable of recording 1.4 million pixels that could produce a 5x7-inch digital photo-quality print.
You can probably safely say that the history of digital photography indicates that the first prototype digital camera was the Mavica (Magnetic Video Camera), released by Sony Corporation in the early 1980's. This was essentially an electronic video camera that produced still images which were recorded on two-inch floppy disks. The images were captured on the disk by using two CCD (charge-coupled device) chips. One chip stored luminance information and the other separately recorded the chrominance information. The images could be stored on the floppy disk either in Frame or Field mode. When the photographer selected the Frame mode, the sensor recorded each picture on two tracks. Up to 25 images could be recorded on each disk.When the photographer selected the Field mode, the camera recorded each picture on only one track, allowing up to 50 images to be recorded. The MVC-5000 was considered to be the leader in image quality during its time. This was then put into a video reader that was connected to a television monitor or color printer. However, the early Mavica cannot be considered a true digital camera even though it started the digital camera revolution. It was a video camera that took video freeze-frames.
Mavica camera looked more like a floppy disk box than a traditional camera. But, nevertheless, the race was on to see who could take this technology to new heights.
The Mavica used a charge-coupled device (CCD), and the origins of the CCD can be traced back to 17th October 1969. This was when George Smith and Willard Boyle, two of the role-players in the history of digital photography, invented the charge-coupled device the image sensor that’s the heart of all digital cameras, at Bell Labs, where they were at the time attempting to create a new kind of semiconductor memory for computers. It took just an hour for them to sketch out the CCD’s basic structure, define the concept of its operation, and outline the applications for which it would be best suited.
By 1970, Smith and Boyle had built the CCD into the world's first solid-state video camera. In 1975, they demonstrated the first CCD camera with image quality sharp enough for broadcast television.
The history of digital photography demonstrates that the CCD played quite a central role in the development of the digital camera. This technology is today also used in broadcasting, and in video applications that range from security monitoring to high-definition television. Facsimile machines, copying machines, image scanners, and bar code readers also make use of CCDs to turn light into useful information.
In 1986, Kodak scientists invented the world's first megapixel sensor, capable of recording 1.4 million pixels that could produce a 5x7-inch digital photo-quality print. In 1987, Kodak released seven products for recording, storing, manipulating, transmitting and printing electronic still video images. In 1990, Kodak developed the Photo CD system and proposed "the first worldwide standard for defining color in the digital environment of computers and computer peripherals." In 1991, Kodak released the first professional digital camera system (DCS), aimed at photojournalists. It was a Nikon F-3 camera equipped by Kodak with a 1.3 megapixel sensor.
Another significant model of camera, XapShot was a Hi-band still video camera. The XapShot had a built-in flash, self-timer, and an unusual rechargeable lead acid battery. Also required was a kit which included one floppy disk, the battery, and computer interface card with software. The American version of the XapShot could send a signal to a TV/VCR for playback and recording of images. There was also a very basic software utility that worked under System 6/7 for the Mac in conjunction with the a special video capture card that the camera connected to. Later, the Xapshot worked with Adobe Photoshop to capture the images.
In 1990, Logitech came out with the Dycam Model 1 black-and-white digicam, the world's first completely digital consumer camera. It stored 32 compressed images internally using 1MB RAM on a 376 x 240 pixel CCD at 256 shades of gray in TIFF format. This simple camera by today’s standards had an 8mm fixed-focus lens, standard shutter speeds of 1/30 to 1/1000 second and a built-in flash. The Dycam worked similarly to the XapShot except that it included the digitizing hardware in the camera itself. The user had to connect the camera to a PC to transfer images.
The first digital cameras for the consumer-level market that worked with a home computer via a serial cable were the Apple QuickTake 100 camera, which appeared in 1994. This camera featured a 640 x 480 pixel CCD which produced eight images stored in internal memory. It also had a built-in flash.
Unfortunately, having a tiny computer inside a camera presented problems in their exterior look. Since the camera’s onboard computer–essentially the CCD processor–occupies so much space that early manufacturers like Fuji created square-shaped digital cameras. These were not only difficult to hold but required the user to learn a whole new way of using the device. But further miniaturizing of the camera’s sensor and it’s inner workings, led companies like Kodak, Nikon, Toshiba and Olympus to produce ever smaller cameras, and ones that a user could hold in much the same way as traditional cameras.
In 2002 Foveon started producing a new image sensor. The reason why this is an advance is that up until this point digital camera sensors have recorded only one type of light at a given location. Individual ‘photosites’ (these are the pixels of the sensor) collect information about either red or green or blue light. The difference with the Foveon sensor is that it collects information about Red, green and blue light at every photosite.
The development of digital cameras continues from this point with the cameras steadily improving all the time. They now have even more megapixels and cost even less. The next significant step in the history of digital photography is the introduction of the digital SLR.
Digital SLRs had been available up until now, but they were strictly for the professionals. Costly and heavy they were never going to become mainstream. Canon changed all that in August of 2003 by launching the Digital Rebel. This camera is of huge significance in the history of digital photography because it was the first affordable digital SLR.
The improvements in film photography led to smaller and better cameras; the improvements made throughout the history of digital photography have led to more pixels, smaller cameras, lower costs and greater memory capacity.
Today, just a little over 30 years after the invention of the original CCD sensor, digital cameras of all sizes and shapes–many of which now look similar to traditional 35mm cameras–are flooding the market.
The future is digital
As the digital revolution has occurred largely in the past ten years, it begs the question - what does the next ten years hold? It was through the convergence of two processes - optics and chemistry - that photography was born. In the past ten years we have witnessed another convergence - between optics and information technology. Information technology replaced the chemical process in capturing and saving an image, opening up new and exciting possibilities for the printing, displaying and sharing of the digital photographic image. Epson have already developed prototypes of electronic paper that may replace the traditional photo album. Imagine your memories moving on the page. Also the way we print our photos will continue to develop, imagine printing your digital photographs directly from your TV by simply pressing a button on your remote control. Our homes may feature large flexible wall displays with changing images that will ‘open-up’ the walls of our homes, creating different settings and atmospheres. You choose what you want from your digital photo library, depending on the occasion and your mood. However, the technology will transform dramatically, and that provides an exciting challenge for us as digital imaging specialists - to keep pushing the boundaries.
