Sasson, who was in Australia this month to boost the launch of the company’s newest Wi Fi digital camera, the EasyShare-one, talked about the moment in late 1974 when his supervisor in electronics group of the applied research laboratory in Rochester came to him with an idea.

“He said that we had a project on the books which involved a new type of imaging device called a CCD, a charge coupled device. The CCD had just started to come out in late 1974 and he said it would be really great if we could get one of those and do some imaging with it.

“I said ‘Great. Let me start.’ I learned a little bit about what this imager was and I said we should try to build a camera. I had no idea how to do it but I knew that the raw materials would probably be available, so I formulated the task. We took a CCD imager from Fairchild, and it was very small by today’s standards -- 100 by 100 elements or 0.01 megapixels.

“It was black and white and the chips themselves came with a custom specification sheet with hand-written voltages because there were about 12 different voltages that had to be adjusted just right to get these things to work. They gave you the device and said: ‘This is where you start. And good luck.’”

It took Sasson a year to produce a camera that weighed four kilos. It took pictures at 0.01 megapixels and captured the image from the CCD digitally and stored it in on-board memory of 49,000 bits. The image was recorded digitally on an audio compact cassette. It took 22 second to record the image and then it was sent to a playback unit created from an old microprocessor which read in the tape, reconstructed the image, converted it to digital frame store and displayed it on a black and white television set.

Sasson had no idea whether or not the device would work until that moment when the very first picture appeared. The reaction from his colleagues was a mix of curiosity and scepticism. “Who wants to see their pictures on a television screen?”

In 1975 it was impossible to foresee that digital would spell doom for thousands of Kodak workers whose jobs depended on chemical based photography. In fact Sasson credits the silver halide experts in the company with helping to develop the image rendering and compression technologies that would make digital imaging viable. It was not until the 1990s that they realised they were conspiring in their own professional demise.

The first Kodak digital cameras produced in 1989 were 1 megapixel pixel units built around Nikon SLR bodies with the processor carried in a pack hanging from the photographer’s belt. The Kodak DSC 1 cost $25,000. A few were sold. The following model, the DSC 2 with the electronics attached in a bulky addition to the camera body, had more appeal to photojournalists and sold about 4000 units at $15,000.

Sasson says that the belief that digital would never replace film was pervasive throughout the company in the early 90s, so when did the penny drop and the chemists start worrying?

“I don’t know if there was one Eureka! moment, but I would say that when I saw the image transceiver work in 1989, using jpeg compression, to send pictures out from Tiananmen Square, I knew it was going to happen. And it was going to happen by the mid 90s.

“It would impact the professionals first before the consumers. Not because of quality but because of cost. In 1991/2 we realised what was going to happen and we started a serious effort around bigger images … we were going after professionals who made a living using cameras and camera bodies.

“The bigger question was when it would really hit the consumer. And we never got a good handle on that. The reason being that there were so many other things that had to happen to influence the migration of the technology into consumers’ hands. The internet, broadband, thermal printing, inkjet printing. Without a clear vision of all of that going on it was impossible to predict when we would get to that point. You could argue that technically if you had 3mp and you could fit it in your pocket and you could store images reasonably quickly the consumer would be interested in it. But we found even when we got to that point, because it was based on a computer and the average person wasn’t really comfortable with computers at that time, that it was going to take a little bit longer for the ease-of-use factor to make it mass market acceptable.”

What camera does the father of digital photography use? A Kodak, of course and he is seriously thinking of updating to the little Kodak V550 (5 megapixels for $699). Steve’s ambitions are modest.

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