Gianluca Pezzi Web Log

World’s First Digital Camera (1975): Created by Kodak’s engineer Steve Sasson

In December 1975, Kodak engineer Steve Sasson invented something that would, decades later, revolutionize photography: the world’s first digital camera.
It was the size of a toaster, and captured black and white images at a resolution of 100×100 – or 0.01 megapixels in today’s marketing terminology.
The
images were stored on cassette tape, taking 23 seconds to write.
The camera uses an ADC from Motorola, a bog-standard (for the 1970s) lens from a Kodak movie camera, and a CCD chip from Fairchild Semiconductor – the same technology that digital cameras still use today. To playback the
images, a special computer and tape reader setup (pictured below) was built, outputting the grainy
images on a standard TV. It took a further 23 seconds to read each image from tape.