Can we blame Kodak?
http://www.smh.com.au/news/icon/still-life/2005/10/11/1128796520785.html
Which reads
"Kodak engineer Steven Sasson knew he was onto something big with his
camera research 30 years ago. What he didn't know was that one day his
15-year-old daughter would be sitting in the back of his car with two
friends, looking into their mobile phones, swapping photos they had just
taken at a rock concert.
"I thought it represented a bit of a view into the future, but what we
can do with images today is amazing," Sasson told Icon on a visit to Sydney.
"These girls were reliving the concert. They weren't going to put [the
photos] up on the mantelpiece or anything, but they were reliving the
moment, saying, 'Look at this one', 'That's when he [the singer] looked
at me!' " he says.
In 1974, Sasson was a junior engineer at Kodak's Applied Electronics
Research Centre in Rochester, New York, when his supervisor gave him an
assignment. It loosely involved devising an all-electronic still camera.
"It was a 15-second conversation. It was just a small, open-ended
project. I turned it into a project to come up with a self-contained
camera."
Sasson wanted to build a camera with no moving parts and one that didn't
consume anything, not even film.I decided to do it digitally because my
training was biased that way and because this was a very small project
and if I were to do it magnetically like a VCR does, I would've required
a much bigger and expensive team."
"With one technician and lots of borrowed equipment including Kodak XL
movie camera lenses, Sasson cobbled together a camera roughly the size
of a shoe box, weighing 3.9kg and powered by 16 AA batteries. It
included a cassette tape to store the images.
The cassette was then played back on another machine and the photos
viewed on a connected TV.
"It took 23 seconds to write the image to the cassette [and] the image
was not very good, but I wanted to demonstrate the concept," he says.
The first picture was of a black and white panel. The second was of a
young female Kodak employee. Unfortunately, he had got wires crossed
and, while the background turned out well, her face was distorted on
screen. "She said, 'It needs more work'," Sasson recalls with a smile.
Asked if he knew his invention would eventually spell death for
photographic film, Sasson chuckled.
"That discussion always took place, but back in 1975, the internet,
laser printing, inkjet printing, file sharing, none of this existed.
People at the time knew this could impact the way we used film, but it
was only in the '80s that it became clear it was [actually] going to
happen."
Although the research and development community was supportive of the
invention, others questioned why anyone would want to look at photos on
TV, especially given the quality of film prints.
This led Kodak to develop the concept to a point where the quality was
comparable or better.
"Only when we got to several million pixels and the time was right,
would we make a camera that was suitable [for commercial purposes]," he
says.
Enter the Apple QuickTake 100, which Kodak developed for the computer
manufacturer in 1994, followed by its own DC40 digital camera, and the
rest is history.
Today Sasson spends less time on cameras and more on the printing side
of the business - researching and building print kiosks and thermal
printers.
David
Chuck Norcutt wrote:
><http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,2144,1746786,00.html>
>
>Chuck Norcutt
>
>
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