The first camera phone photo is shared

In 1995, the Macworld print magazine had an article that imagined what Apple might create. Apple actually shared a design for a never-released videophone that combined the look of the company’s Newton PDA with a video camera and display.

On 11, 1997, inventor Phillipe Kahn captured a photo of his newborn daughter with his digital camera in a maternity ward at Sutter Maternity Center in Santa Cruz, California.

Kahn, who had a server running at his home, used a Casio QV digital camera (one of the first successful digital cameras), a Motorola StarTAC mobile phone and a laptop to capture the image.

Shortly after the new baby arrived, Khan was ready to take a photo of her. Holding his daughter in one hand, and the camera in the other, he snapped the first photo of his baby. He instantly shares the first ever camera phone photograph with more than 2000 friends and family members.

Since “camera phones” didn’t exist at that time, Kahn actually hacked together a primitive one by combining his digital camera and a cell phone.

This was the spark that started it all - soon afterwards, Nokia, Sharp and Sony Ericsson would all launch camera phones.’’ In May of 1999, Japan was the launchpad for the Kyocera VP-210. It was the first such phone with a built-in camera that was sold commercially to the general public.

On Sep 7 2000, Phillipe Kahn demonstrates the camera phone and instant photo sharing infrastructure at the DEMOmobile conference. It is the first public demonstration of photo sharing services.

In 2016, Time Magazine named Kahn’s seminal camera phone photo one of the 100 most influential photos of all time.
The first camera phone photo is shared

The first digital camera

In 1973, Steven Sasson, a young engineer, went to work for Eastman Kodak. Two years later he invented digital photography and made the first digital camera. Sasson’s work on the first digital camera was more of an experiment than a product development effort and many technical hurdles remained before it could be marketed.

After arriving at Kodak, Mr. Sasson was given a seemingly unimportant task — to see whether there was any practical use for a charged coupled device (C.C.D.). His boss suggested that he try using the 100-by-100-pixel CCD to digitize an image.

Charge-coupled devices, the very first digital imaging sensors, were still a relatively new technology at the time. CCD had only been invented six years earlier, in 1969, by George Smith and Willard Boyle of Bell Labs. Early CCDs yielded low resolution still images, but were put to use in video cameras in 1970.

Sasson quickly ordered a couple of them and set out to evaluate the devices, which consisted of a sensor that took an incoming two-dimensional light pattern and converted it into an electrical signal. Mr. Sasson wanted to capture an image with it, but the C.C.D. couldn’t hold it because the electrical pulses quickly dissipated.

After working on his camera on and off for a year, Sasson decided on 12 December 1975 that he was ready to take his first picture. Lab technician Joy Marshall agreed to pose. The photo took about 23 seconds to record onto the audio tape.

To store the image, he decided to use what was at that time a relatively new process — digitalization — turning the electronic pulses into numbers. But that solution led to another challenge — storing it on RAM memory, then getting it onto digital magnetic tape.

The final result was a Rube Goldberg device with a lens scavenged from a used Super-8 movie camera; a portable digital cassette recorder; 16 nickel cadmium batteries; an analog/digital converter; and several dozen circuits — all wired together on half a dozen circuit boards.

The camera weighed eight pounds and took 23 seconds to make a photograph. It recorded 10,000-pixel (or 0.01 megapixel) black and white images on a cassette tape that could hold thirty pictures, which could then be played back as an image from the data stored on the tape.

Sasson and his supervisor, Garreth Lloyd, received U.S. Patent No. 4,131,919 for an electronic still camera in 1978.

Modern digital cameras evolved from a machine that was heavy, slow, and required an array of additional equipment to have an image displayed.
The first digital camera

History of digital camera

In 1947, transistor was invented by three scientists in Bell Labs: John Bardeen, Walter Brattain and William Shockley.  Transistor later became the basic component of digital camera.

The digital camera was an outgrowth of the video tape recorder, first developed in 1951, and charge-couple device (CCD), invented in 1959 at Bell Labs.

Texas Instruments patented the first filmless digital camera for still images in 1972. The first digital camera was born in Kodak Company in 1975, but begun to produce civil product after 23 years in 1998.

In 1986 Kodak invented the first megapixel sensor which allowed the recording of 1.6 million pixels, allowing a 5 by 7 inch picture with quality equivalent to or better than a film picture.

The first consumer digital camera was launched in 1990 by the American company Dycam. In 1995, Casio Inc. and Canon Inc. respectively produced a digital camera.
History of digital camera