History Of Digital Photography

As we speak, digital cameras have been around for a number of years and are now the preferred industry standard. In fact, many of the masses today out their taking pictures have only ever been exposed to and use digital cameras. With that in mind and for those who remember let's take a quick look at the history of digital photography.

Although in the grand scheme of photography, digital is relatively new, but it still remains as the single biggest advancement in how we take pictures (other than the invention of the camera itself).

The original technology behind the digital technology was the invention of a charge coupled device or a CCD as most know it. Inventors George Smith and Willard Boyle were the minds behind the CCD which came to fruition in October of 1969. Their initial thinking was how to devise a way to incorporate their CCD into video phones. As it turned out however, Smith and Boyle ultimately implemented the CCD into the world's first CCD... and as the saying goes... the rest is history. A history that stood photography on its head.

The camera that they built was actually a solid state video camera; and the sharp images of the CCD camera was seen on television for the first time in the mid 1970's.

As far as the history of digital photography is concerned, the first actual digital camera was created by Sony in 1981. This prototype named Mavica (which spun off off Magnetic Video Camera) was basically a video camera that would capture images from freeze frames.

Digital photography began to really grow legs when in 1986 Kodak came out with the first megapixel senor. This initial senor was able to record 1.4 million pixels and were able to produce a 5x7 digital photo quality print... shortly thereafter, Kodak released 7 products that could manipulate digital images.

Continuing on the time line history of digital photography, Kodak (in partnership with Nikon) released the Nikon F-3 camera in 1991. This camera effectively was the marriage of technology with functional digital picture taking with its 1.3 megapixel senor from Kodak.

Soon thereafter other companies began entering the marketplace with their own version of digital photography including Apple which produced a digital camera that could transfer the images to a hard drive... and the rest they say is history... the history of digital photography.