The History of Digital Photography

The history of digital photography is longer than you might think. The first ever digital image was taken in 1963.

In 1963, a student at Stanford University invented a videodisk camera that would store an image on a disk. These images only lasted a few minutes and weren't very good quality, but they were the first step in developing a technology that would change the photography world forever.

With the invention of charge-coupled device (CCD) technology in 1969, we came that much closer to getting what we call a digital camera today. CCD was invented by George Smith and Willard Boyle at the Bell Laboratories. This is the technology that lead to the invention of the first video camera.

You may be wondering what video cameras have to do with the history of digital photography. Don't worry, I'll tell you.

Well, prior to this technology images were captured on film. When you see a strip of film you can hold it up and see the individual images, but if you hold up a video tape you can't see the images. The images have to be read by a machine in order to be seen. These CCD cameras made images that were good enough for them to be used by television stations. CCD technology is what's used in digital cameras today. It's also used in scanners, photocopiers and bar code scanners.

In 1981, Sony made the first digital camera. It was called the Mavica, short for magnetic video camera. The camera took images and stored them on a floppy disk--remember those? The disk could store up to 25 images. The Mavica was a cumbersome and unattractive camera that never really caught on.

In the mid 80's Kodak invented the first megapixel sensor. This was a big deal. In 1987, they released the first products using this technology on the consumer market.

In 1991, Kodak along with Nikon released it's first digital camera aimed at professional photographers.

Apple QuickTake 100 camera was the first digital camera released to consumers. The camera costs $749.

You can get cameras better than that for a lot less now. It's a good thing too. Now that digital cameras are easily accessible just about everyone has one. Photography is a fast growing hobby.

You can buy digital cameras for as little as $50 or as much as you could ever possibly be willing to spend. The range of cameras available are endless.

Now cameras can be small enough to fit inside a cell phone or as large as a standard 35mm SLR camera. The range is amazing really.

Technology continues to advance. Every year new cameras come out with better sensors and increased ability to take wonderful pictures. While I don't think current digital cameras can take pictures the include the incredible detail and quality of larger format 4x5 and 8x10 film cameras. Photographers like Ansel Adams took legendary photographs with his 8x10 camera. I have seen a medium format digital SLR digital camera for sale online, but it was $34,000 and I don't know much about the camera itself.

That pretty much covers the history of digital photography until now. I'll add to this page as new advances occur.