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October 28, 2009
[INNOVATION AND VISION]
Steve Sasson with a mockup of the world’s first digital camera
Now that digital photography seems to be here to stay it is safe to start handing out the prizes to the inventors. And this is the month for awarding the gongs.
Part of this year's Nobel prize for Physics goes to Willard S. Boyle and George E. Smith of Bell Laboratories in America "for the invention of an imaging semiconductor circuit – the CCD sensor".
In 1969 Boyle and Smith invented the CCD (Charge-Coupled Device) which is the solid-state heart of the digital camera, replacing film in the photographic process by capturing light and turning it into electric signals. These signals are then passed through the camera's image processing engine and turned into a visible, full colour picture.
The first CCDs were coarse by today's standards, having only a few light receptors (pixels) on the light-capturing surface. But it was one of these simple devices that was passed on to the Kodak research laboratory in Rochester, where it was handed over to Steve Sasson, a young Kodak scientist, who was told to see if there was any useful application for it.
Today, 29 October, Steve Sasson is in London to receive The Economist’s Innovation Award for Consumer Products and Services “for contributions to photography and imaging which have revolutionised the face of consumer photography today.”
As The Economist describes Sasson's achievement: “The invention of the digital camera began with a 30-second conversation when Mr Sasson's supervisor asked whether it was possible to build a camera with a new type of electronic sensor called a charge-coupled device.
“Mr Sasson's original prototype weighed eight pounds, recorded black and white images to a cassette tape, had a resolution of 0.01 megapixel and took 23 seconds to capture its first image. In 1978, Mr Sasson was issued a US patent for the digital camera and Eastman Kodak was the first company to develop a megapixel digital camera in 1986, and one of the first companies to develop a consumer digital camera.”
In fact Sasson demonstrated the first camera to his colleagues in 1975. The camera had been cobbled together from bits in the Kodak parts box and the image was stored on a modified audio cassette recorder. The picture was displayed on a small, crude black and white TV.
He says that his colleagues viewed his box of tricks with a mix of curiosity and scepticism, but the realisation that Kodak, the film company, had created its own nemesis didn't dawn until “...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 …
“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.”
Now digital photography for the masses is here and the inventors are being honoured. Kodak's former employees might not be so ready to heap prizes on the inventors – the company's workforce has shrunk from 132,600 in 1993 to 24,000 in 2008 with more sackings this year. And there is more bitter irony for former Kodak workers to contemplate. The red, green and blue filter array that is essential to reinterpret the greyscale information coming from the CCD and to turn it into colour was also invented in the Eastman Kodak laboratory by Bryce Bayer – hence the name Bayer Filter.
Altogether Kodak holds more than 1,000 patents on technology fundamental to digital photography and at various times it has taken legal action against Sony, LG, Samsung and RIM (Blackberry) for alleged infringements. Which raises the question: is there any precedent for a great corporation spending millions to destroy itself? Where is Shakespeare when we need him to tell the story?
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Posted by terry at October 28, 2009 06:47 PM
