Digital Photography is continuously growing these days. You’ll find more and more people who buy digital SLR’s and digital cameras even if they aren’t professional photographers. They simply have made it into a hobby which perhaps was brought about the growing technology and various websites in the Internet that promote sharing of photos and such. But the question is, do you know the history of digital photography? You may be an enthusiast right now but knowing a thing or two about its past will help you understand a lot of things about the world of digital photography.
Let’s start with George Smith and Willard Boyle. Thanks to these two, the CCD or charge-coupled device was invented in the year 1969. It was the 17th of October when the image sensor was discovered. If you don’t already know, the image sensor is like the heart of all digital cameras. Without it, there will be no digital photography. So after having been able to create the image sensor, they start making some kind of semiconductor such as the ones in your computers. Aside from the image sensor, they also tried to develop the very first solid-state camera that will be used in video conferencing in phones. It took only an hour until they were able to sketch out everything they plan to do. They succeeded and have built the first solid-state video camera in the year 1970s. And in 1975, they came up with the first CCD camera that was sharp enough for TV broadcasting. Now the CCD technology is widely used in other applications such as HD television, video conferencing, fax and copying machine, bar codes, endoscopy, security monitoring, digital still cameras, and even image scanners.
When 1981 came, it was only when the prototype of the first digital camera was introduced. It was none other than Sony Corporation who introduced their Mavica electronic still camera. Mavica was short for magnetic video camera. The photos were recorded as magnetic impulses on a floppy disk. Again, they made use of the CCD technology by using two CCD chips. The first one being storage of luminance information while the second records the chrominance information. You might not believe it but that camera can accommodate a 720,000-pixel image stored on the disk in field or frame mode. Field mode allows for 50 images on a disk while the latter allowed only 25 images, meaning it featured more detailed images. During that time, it was the leader in still camera. However, to view the photos you will need to connect it into a video reader connected to a printer of TV monitor. Thus, it wasn’t considered a real digital camera as it was in reality, a video camera taking video freeze-frames.
1986 came and it was the scientists from Kodak who invented the megapixel sensor. In 1987, they released seven products that were used for recording, storing, editing, transmitting, as well as printing the electronic still video images. But the first professional digital camera systems, more popularly called the DCS, which were intended for the professional photographers, was released by Kodak in 1991.
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