1990 The first digital machines
The beginning of the last decade of the XX century was marked by a series of fundamental innovations, perceived as such by computer enthusiasts, but not having the same impact in photographic circles.
1990 saw the appearance of the first entirely digital camera, the FotoMan, launched by Logitech, a Swiss company. This revolutionary machine no longer used an intermediary facility to store the pictures, which were viewed and treated in the computer by means of the Fototouch software.
In 1991, Kodak launched its DCS (Digital Camera System) system: an element constructed on a Nikon F3 and connected to a separate storage unit containing batteries and fitted with a small screen on which to view the pictures (capacity of 200 megabytes).
The first digital camera back allowing instant black and white, but not colour, was offered by Leaf. It was designed for professional equipment such as the Hasselblad medium format and the Sinar large format chambers.
1990 also saw the birth of Photoshop, a picture processing software, initially conceived for printing. The Classic Mac with colour screen came out in 1993, after which it became a lot easier to process photographs on the computer, but their printing had not yet achieved the same degree of simplicity. Digital photography could not yet do without film or photographic paper. The pictures were most often “flashed” onto film with an image recorder such as the Polaroid Palette for 35mm film or Polaroid film or with much heavier machines for graphic art applications.
