Steve Sasson

Steven J. Sasson is an electrical engineer and the inventor of the digital camera and his invention began with a simple 30-second conversation with his boss.

In this film, Sasson brings along the invaluable camera and discusses with us in vivd detail his premise for creating the very first digital camera. On a very low budget and literally working out of an Eastman Kodak “back lab”, he recounts the initial imperfections and numerous intricacies involved with this revolutionary project.

Sasson began in 1975 with a very broad assignment from his supervisor at Eastman Kodak Company. The task was, could a digital camera be built using solid state electronics, solid state imagers, an electronic sensor known as a charge coupled device (CCD) that gathers optical information. The practical side was somewhat daunting. His camera had to be built from many different devices as Sasson used whatever that was made available: an analog-to-digital converter adapted from Motorola Inc. components, a Kodak movie-camera lens and the tiny CCD chips introduced by Fairchild Semiconductor.

There were no images to look at until the entire prototype — an 8-pound (3.6-kilogram), microwave-size contraption — was assembled. In December 1975, Sasson and his chief technician persuaded a lab assistant to pose for them. The black-and-white image, captured at a resolution of .01 megapixels (10,000 pixels), took 23 seconds to record onto a digital cassette tape and another 23 seconds to read off a playback unit onto a television. Then it popped up on the screen.

"You could see the silhouette of her hair," Sasson said. But her face was a blur of static. "She was less than happy with the photograph and left, saying, “You need work”. But Sasson knew right away his digital camera “was a little bit revolutionary.” Sasson predicted the amount of time it would take before the digital camera he had invented would actually be consumer ready, using Moore's law, a long-term trend that specifies the history of computing hardware, measuring such capabilities of digital electronic devices such as, processing speed, memory capacity, even the number and size of pixels in digital cameras.

His prediction of approximately 20 to 30 years proved to be accurate. A lot of innovation has taken place at Kodak in the last 30 years. Kodak has been the pioneer in several technologies in photography. No matter who makes which digital camera you use today, the camera uses a lot of IP (intellectual property) that Kodak first created. Kodak invented the first megapixel sensor. The first colour filter tray was from Kodak. Image compression up to the JPEG standard and, of course, the first digital camera was also developed at the Kodak Labs.

One of Kodak’s cameras was used in the space shuttle mission in the United States in 1991. And their first consumer camera was launched in 1994 under the name of Apple Quick Take, which was introduced in association with Apple Computers. "Innovation best comes from people who really know nothing about the topic," says Sasson, who is still on a journey -- that he describes as 'fun with photography' -- to innovate new technologies that will revolutionize photography.

The sky is the limit for what Sasson envisons. The challenges are formidable, as photography has opened more challenges than ever, and cameras are marvellous devices and are getting better, smaller, futuristic with more features. Sasson is excited and clearly focused on the entire photography chain, and to make every element of the chain from capturing the image, to processing, to printing and making the final digital file easy, fun, quick and interactive for everyone.