When was the first digital camera?

[DEMDeepEllumMusic]

Though it was just an idea in a lab the first digital camera took it's first shot in

Digital camera - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (read about 1/3rd of the way down under History)
That is Steve Sasson holding the camera.

[Cajungaltx]

Oh well, tried the year I was born... I was off a couple years. ;-)

[DEMDeepEllumMusic]

KodakDigital_1st (CWks5)
Details the history of Kodak and the Digital Camera, too bad that he did not slap on a Kodak Badge on that camera for the picture.

[ChristopherCoy]

I said 81... when I was 1 year old.

[kenw]

The 1st I used was in the mid/late 80s(?), it was a prototype by a Japanese company that I worked with (name I can’t mention, but they aren’t known for cameras or optics). No viewfinder, optical or otherwise. Fixed focal length. Greyscale only, iirc smaller than 200x300 pixels. Point, shoot, pray. No way to see what you got until you opened it up on the computer, with a proprietary viewer. No, it wasn’t JPG, either. It was a proprietary format.

Needless to say it never saw the light of day.

But it was fun…..

my 1st useable was actually a Snappy VideoSnapshot, it digitized composite video from a video camera (analog). Not bad for $100 in 1999.

[DEMDeepEllumMusic]

It's amazing on how much it has advanced-from writing to a cassette tape that took 23 seconds and produced an image that was only .01 megapixel and was black and white only and the camera weighed 8 lbs with a very small lens on it to what we have today.

I wonder what the first thing that he took a picture of was (other than a test pattern)?

[Daniel Bates]

Probably his cat.

[DEMDeepEllumMusic]

You think that you could get a cat to set still for 23 seconds? Maybe if it was asleep!
No, probably was some object that was well lighted.

Jeeze just think of all of the shots that you would never get if each shot was 23 seconds long. Not sure if the shutter was open very long or if it just took that long to write the data to tape. So maybe not a 23 second Exposure but a 23 second write to data time.

Interesting that so many people think that it was 1973-40% right now- just think back to the electronics that were available in 73- TI and HP calculators-digital watches with RED LED output-