Greetings and salutations!
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| First know scanned image of Russell Kirsch's son |
And so begins a 14 week journey into the world of digital photography. In the following weeks we will be exploring the medium of digital photography.
So, no better place to start than the beginning. As the history of the digital image goes, technically, the picture to the right is the first digital image. The first film photo registered by a computer and recreated in pixels (30,976 to be exact).
In 1957, Russell Kirsch used a drum scanner connected to the SEAC (Standards Electronic Automatic Computer) to scan an image of his three-month-old son Walden. The scanner used a very sensitive light-detecting tube called a photomultiplier to translate the parts of the image into black or white square pixels. If light was reflected off a scanned spot on the photo, SEAC registered a 0 (white). If no light signal was received, it registered a 1 (black).
Arguably, the photograph above is only the first image (since it was a scanned photograph) but the first photograph seems to go to Steve Sasson and his team at Eastman Kodak. Steve Sasson was employed at the applied research lab at Eastman Kodak when he started working with a new technology called a charge-coupled device (the CCD sensor). Within a year, the digital camera found its way into the world. Ironically, this piece of technology would later be the demise of the parent company.
"The revolution was going to happen," Sasson says.
"I didn't know when, and I didn't know how effective it would be. In the
end result, the fundamental business model of Kodak was undermined by the new
technology."
Sasson is credited with building the first digital camera in 1974 using a Fairchild CCD. He used an imaging chip to receive light from the lens and convert it into numbers. He placed it in his playback unit, and in about 30 seconds he and his team saw the first digital image. "That first camera I took pictures with was only .01 megapixels [by] today's standard," Sasson says.
Kodak declared bankruptcy in 2012, but according to the Wall Street Journal, it expects to exit Chapter 11 protection in the third quarter of 2013. For the video please follow to:
-Tim
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