1975 The Invention
Born in 1950, Steven J. Sasson, electrical engineer by training, at that time a young researcher with Kodak Apparatus Division Research Laboratory, was asked this question by his superior: can one conceive a camera, which combines the technology of the CCD captor (Charged Coupled Device – a transfer charging instrument) with digital picture treatment?
From the beginning of the 1970s, Texas Instruments and Fairchild were each developing cameras, where the film was replaced by a CCD captor and image obtained treated analogically.
From 1975, Steven J. Sasson devised a system integrating several technologies already existing: he used a Kodak camera equipped with a Fairchild CCD captor, connected to a Motorola analogue- digital image converter. He took his first photograph in December, a black and white portrait of 100×100 pixels. Its recording onto a magnetic tape, a mini cassette, was made in 23 seconds, the same time required to read and transmit this picture onto a television screen. In 1977, Sasson presented a report of about forty pages to his employer, whose conclusion, very visionary, drafted the whole path to follow for this new photography to become truly functional. The patent was dated 26 December 1978…
