A Timeline Of The History Of Digital Photography
Digital photography is an epic 20th century invention that has changed the way the world takes pictures and, more importantly, the way the world shares its pictures. A brief history of digital photography reveals just how new this innovative technology is.
History Of Digital Photography And Technology Timeline
Early 19th Century: Photography was invented in the early 19th century during the U.S. Civil War. Prints from this period are often portrait style, black and white or sepia toned. Subjects had to sit still for a few seconds and wait for the exposure to take hold.
1930s: Black-and-white photography evolved to produce the amazing, clear-focus news stills and portraits that made LIFE magazine the most popular photography-news magazine of its time.
1950s: Color photography is available to the masses. Polaroid photographs, which self-developed within minutes, whetted the public's attention for the instant gratification digital photography would bring.
1960s: In a momentous event in the history of digital photography, NASA began sending digital signals from the moon to earth to map the surface of the moon.
1963: The history of digital photography is born when a student at Stanford University makes a videodisk camera that stores a photograph image in a disk for several minutes.
1972: Texas Instruments patents a filmless electronic camera.
1970s: Kodak continues to work on digital photography technologies.
1981: Sony releases the Sony Mavica electronic still camera, which records images onto a mini disc that can be inserted into a video reader connected to a TV monitor or color printer. Mavica did not use digital photography technology; rather it took video pictures in freeze frames.
1987: Kodak releases seven products for working with electronic still video images.
1990: Kodak develops the photo CD system.
1991: Kodak releases its digital photography camera system, marketed to professional photographers.
1994: The Apple QuickTake 100 camera is the first commercially available digital photography camera of history that connects to the consumer's home computer via a serial cable.
1995: The Kodak CD40 camera is released. The first LCD monitor attached to a digital photography still camera is released in the Casio VQ-11 camera.
1996: Sony releases its cyber-shot digital camera - still regarded as one of the best cameras in the history of digital photography.
What made digital photography take off the way it did was the simultaneous development of digital cameras and the Internet. With the availability and affordability of both digital cameras and the Internet making both available to the average consumer, digital picture-takers discovered the joy of e-mailing digital photographs to friends and family members far away.
Digital photography made it possible for parents of babies and young children to take pictures of their kids, view them on their PCs, eliminate the bad shots without spending money to have them developed, and send the best of the pictures to Grandma and Grandpa, all within minutes of taking the pictures.
Digital photography is a historical innovation that changed the way the world takes pictures.
