A man named Steven Sasson was working for Eastman Kodak when he invented the world's first digital camera in 1975. At the time, it weighed eight pounds and took 0.01MP photos which were stored on delicate cassettes. We've come quite a long way, considering we can now save thousands of pictures on memory cards that are smaller than your fingernails.
The first digital photo ever taken was in 1975, and it was of a lab technician named Joy. The picture wasn't saved for keepsake purposes, unfortunately. Kodak did not see eye to eye with Steven about the future of digital images. But no-one could blame the company for their doubt as the world was not yet ready for such an invention. At the time, there was no internet, no cellphones, and the majority of TVs were still black and white.
Kodak was also in its heyday, holding 90% of the film market at the time. They didn't see digital as the future of photography and, therefore, chose not to work with Sasson's invention. Steven saw the potential of digital photography. But he never thought that it would evolve into the giant industry it is today.
The digital camera prototype used parts from the Kodak Super 8 movie cameras, half a dozen custom circuit boards, and a CCD sensor that shot black and white. Images would then go through the detector and into the camera's temporary memory that would last for 50ms. If you liked the photo, saving it would take 23 seconds.
A cassette tape could hold 30 images, which means there would be 24 to 36 exposures. While it couldn't store thousands of photos like modern devices, it was impressive for the time. Today, storing a thousand pictures is an everyday thing for wedding photographers.
The 16 Ni-Cad battery-powered digital camera was portable but quite chunky with a weight of 3.6kg (eight lbs). It's hard to imagine it as a reliable device for handheld shooting. Looking back, it’s amazing to see how cameras today have evolved, with features like 4K video, 100MP medium format, and 50MP 35mm format DSLRs. Can you even imagine how things will be 40 years from now?