History of the camera

The history of the camera can be traced back much further than the
introduction of photography. Photographic cameras evolved from the camera
obscura, and continued to change through many generations of photographic
technology, including daguerreotypes, calotypes, dry plates, film, and digital
cameras.

The camera obscura

An artist using an 18th century camera obscura to trace an image

Photographic cameras were a development of the camera obscura, a device

dating back to the ancient Chinese[1] and ancient Greeks,[2][3] which uses
a pinhole or lens to project an image of the scene outside upside-down onto a
viewing surface.
Scientist-monk Roger Bacon also studied the matter. Bacon's notes and
drawings, published as Perspectiva in 1267, are partly clouded with
theological material describing how the Devil can insinuate himself through the pinhole by magic, [4] and
it is not clear whether or not he produced such a device. On 24 January 1544 mathematician and
instrument maker Reiners Gemma Frisius ofLeuven University used one to watch a solar eclipse,
publishing a diagram of his method in De Radio Astronimica et Geometrico in the following year.[5] In
1558 Giovanni Batista della Porta was the first to recommend the method as an aid to drawing. [6]
Before the invention of photographic processes there was no way to preserve the images produced by
these cameras apart from manually tracing them. The earliest cameras were room-sized, with space
for one or more people inside; these gradually evolved into more and more compact models such as
that by Nipce's time portable handheld cameras suitable for photography were readily available. The
first camera that was small and portable enough to be practical for photography was built by Johann
Zahn in 1685, though it would be almost 150 years before such an application was possible.

Early fixed images

The first partially successful photograph of a camera image was made in approximately 1816
by Nicphore Nipce[7][8] using a very small camera of his own making and a piece of paper coated
with silver chloride, which darkened where it was exposed to light. No means of removing the
remaining unaffected silver chloride was known to Nipce, so the photograph was not permanent,
eventually becoming entirely darkened by the overall exposure to light necessary for viewing it. Later,
in 1826, he used a sliding wooden box camera made by Charles and Vincent Chevalier in Paris,
France. He made his first permanent camera photograph in 1826 by coating a pewter plate
with bitumenand exposing the plate in this camera.[9] The bitumen hardened where light struck. The
unhardened areas were then dissolved away. This photograph still survives.

Daguerreotypes and calotypes

Daguerreotype camera built by La Maison Susse Frres in 1839, with a lens by Charles Chevalier

Louis Daguerre and Joseph Nicphore Nipce (who was Daguerre's

partner, but died before their invention was completed) invented the first
practical photographic method, which was named the daguerreotype, in
1836. Daguerre coated a copper plate with silver, then treated it with iodine
vapor to make it sensitive to light. The image was developed by mercury vapor and fixed with a strong

solution of ordinary salt (sodium chloride). Henry Fox Talbot perfected a different process,
the calotype, in 1840. Both used cameras that were little different from Zahn's model, with a sensitized
plate or sheet of paper placed in front of the viewing screen to record the image. Focusing was
generally via sliding boxes.

Dry plates
19th century studio camera

Collodion dry plates had been available since 1855, thanks to the work
of Dsir van Monckhoven, but it was not until the invention of
the gelatin dry plate in 1871 by Richard Leach Maddox that they rivaled
wet plates in speed and quality. Also, for the first time, cameras could be
made small enough to be hand-held, or even concealed. There was a
proliferation of various designs, from single- and twin-lens reflexes to
large and bulky field cameras, handheld cameras, and even "detective
cameras" disguised as pocket watches, hats, or other objects.
The shortened exposure times that made candid photography possible also necessitated another
innovation, the mechanicalshutter. The very first shutters were separate accessories, though built-in
shutters were common by the turn of the century.[10]

Kodak and the birth of film

The use of photographic film was pioneered by George Eastman, who started
manufacturing paper film in 1885 before switching to celluloid in 1889. His first
camera, which he called the "Kodak," was first offered for sale in 1888. It was a
very simple box camera with a fixed-focus lens and single shutter speed, which
along with its relatively low price appealed to the average consumer. The Kodak
came pre-loaded with enough film for 100 exposures and needed to be sent
back to the factory for processing and reloading when the roll was finished. By
the end of the 19th century Eastman had expanded his lineup to several models
including both box and folding cameras.
In 1900, Eastman took mass-market photography one step further with the Brownie, a simple and very
inexpensive box camera that introduced the concept of the snapshot. The Brownie was extremely
popular and various models remained on sale until the 1960s.
Film also allowed the movie camera to develop from an expensive toy to a practical commercial tool.
Despite the advances in low-cost photography made possible by Eastman, plate cameras still offered
higher-quality prints and remained popular well into the 20th century. To compete with rollfilm cameras,
which offered a larger number of exposures per loading, many inexpensive plate cameras from this era
were equipped with magazines to hold several plates at once. Special backs for plate cameras
allowing them to use film packs or rollfilm were also available, as were backs that enabled roll film
cameras to use plates.
Except for a few special types such as Schmidt cameras, most professional astrographs continued to
use plates until the end of the century when electronic photography replaced them.

Instant cameras

While conventional cameras were becoming more refined and sophisticated,

an entirely new type of camera appeared on the market in 1948. This was
the Polaroid Model 95, the world's first viable instant-picture camera. Known
as a Land Camera after its inventor, Edwin Land, the Model 95 used a
patented chemical process to produce finished positive prints from the
exposed negatives in under a minute. The Land Camera caught on despite its
relatively high price and the Polaroid lineup had expanded to dozens of
models by the 1960s. The first Polaroid camera aimed at the popular market,
the Model 20 Swinger of 1965, was a huge success and remains one of the top-selling cameras of all
time.

Automation
The first camera to feature automatic exposure was the selenium light meter-equipped, fully automatic
Super Kodak Six-20 of 1938, but its extremely high price (for the time) of $225 (3715 in present
terms[11]) kept it from achieving any degree of success. By the 1960s, however, low-cost electronic
components were commonplace and cameras equipped with light meters and automatic exposure
systems became increasingly widespread.
The next technological advance came in 1960, when the German Mec 16 SB subminiature became
the first camera to place the light meter behind the lens for more accurate metering. However, throughthe-lens metering ultimately became a feature more commonly found on SLRs than other types of
camera; the first SLR equipped with a TTL system was the Topcon RE Super of 1962.

Digital cameras
Digital cameras differ from their analog predecessors primarily in that they do not use film, but capture
and save photographs on digital memory cards or internal storage instead. Their low operating costs
have relegated chemical cameras to niche markets. Digital cameras now include wireless
communication capabilities (for example Wi-Fi orBluetooth) to transfer, print or share photos, and are
commonly found on mobile phones.

Early development
The concept of digitizing images on scanners, and the concept of digitizing video signals, predate the
concept of making still pictures by digitizing signals from an array of discrete sensor elements. At
Philips Labs. In New York, Edward Stupp, Pieter Cath and Zsolt Szilagyi filed for a patent on "All Solid
State Radiation Imagers" on 6 September 1968 and constructed a flat-screen target for receiving and
storing an optical image on a matrix composed of an array of photodiodes connected to a capacitor to
form an array of two terminal devices connected in rows and columns. Their US patent was granted on
10 November 1970. Texas Instruments engineer Willis Adcock designed a filmless camera that was
not digital and applied for a patent in 1972, but it is not known whether it was ever built.The first
recorded attempt at building a digital camera was in 1975 by Steven Sasson, an engineer at Eastman
Kodak. It used the then-new solid-state CCD image sensor chips developed by Fairchild
Semiconductor in 1973.The camera weighed 8 pounds (3.6 kg), recorded black and white images to a

compact cassette tape, had a resolution of 0.01 megapixels (10,000 pixels), and took 23 seconds to
capture its first image in December 1975. The prototype camera was a technical exercise, not intended
for production.

Analog electronic cameras Sony Mavica, 1981

Handheld electronic cameras, in the sense of a device meant to be carried and
used like a handheld film camera, appeared in 1981 with the demonstration of
the Sony Mavica (Magnetic Video Camera). This is not to be confused with the
later cameras by Sony that also bore the Mavica name. This was an analog
camera, in that it recorded pixel signals continuously, as videotape machines
did, without converting them to discrete levels; it recorded television-like
signals to a 2 2 inch "video floppy". In essence it was a video movie camera
that recorded single frames, 50 per disk in field mode and 25 per disk in frame
mode. The image quality was considered equal to that of then-current televisions.
Canon RC-701, 1986

Analog electronic cameras do not appear to have reached the market until 1986
with the Canon RC-701. Canon demonstrated a prototype of this model at
the 1984 Summer Olympics, printing the images in the Yomiuri Shimbun, a
Japanese newspaper. In the United States, the first publication to use these
cameras for real reportage was USA Today, in its coverage of World Series
baseball. Several factors held back the widespread adoption of analog cameras;
the cost (upwards of $20,000), poor image quality compared to film, and the lack of quality affordable
printers. Capturing and printing an image originally required access to equipment such as a frame
grabber, which was beyond the reach of the average consumer. The "video floppy" disks later had
several reader devices available for viewing on a screen, but were never standardized as a computer
drive.
The early adopters tended to be in the news media, where the cost was negated by the utility and the
ability to transmit images by telephone lines. The poor image quality was offset by the low resolution of
newspaper graphics. This capability to transmit images without a satellite link was useful during
the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 and the first Gulf War in 1991.
US government agencies also took a strong interest in the still video concept, notably the US Navy for
use as a real time air-to-sea surveillance system.
The first analog electronic camera marketed to consumers may have been the Canon RC-250 Xapshot
in 1988. A notable analog camera produced the same year was the Nikon QV-1000C, designed as a
press camera and not offered for sale to general users, which sold only a few hundred units. It
recorded images in greyscale, and the quality in newspaper print was equal to film cameras. In
appearance it closely resembled a modern digital single-lens reflex camera. Images were stored on
video floppy disks.
Silicon Film, a proposed digital sensor cartridge for film cameras that would allow 35 mm cameras to
take digital photographs without modification was announced in late 1998. Silicon Film was to work like
a roll of 35 mm film, with a 1.3 megapixel sensor behind the lens and a battery and storage unit fitting
in the film holder in the camera. The product, which was never released, became increasingly obsolete

due to improvements in digital camera technology and affordability. Silicon Films' parent company filed
for bankruptcy in 2001.[18]

The arrival of true digital cameras

Nikon D1, 1999

The first true digital camera that recorded images as a computerized file was
likely the Fuji DS-1P of 1988, which recorded to a 16 MB internal memory card
that used a battery to keep the data in memory. This camera was never
marketed in the United States, and has not been confirmed to have shipped
even in Japan.
The first commercially available digital camera was the 1990 Dycam Model 1; it
also sold as the Logitech Fotoman. It used a CCD image sensor, stored pictures digitally, and
connected directly to a computer for download.[19][20][21]
In 1991, Kodak brought to market the Kodak DCS-100, the beginning of a long line of
professional Kodak DCS SLR cameras that were based in part on film bodies, often Nikons. It used a
1.3 megapixel sensor and was priced at $13,000.
The move to digital formats was helped by the formation of the first JPEG and MPEG standards in
1988, which allowed image and video files to be compressed for storage. The first consumer camera
with a liquid crystal display on the back was the Casio QV-10developed by a team lead by Hiroyuki
Suetaka in 1995 after the first digital camera released on the consumer market by his team 8 years
earlier had flopped. The first camera to use Compact Flash was the Kodak DC-25 in 1996.
The marketplace for consumer digital cameras was originally low resolution (either analog or digital)
cameras built for utility. In 1997 the first megapixel cameras for consumers were marketed. The first
camera that offered the ability to record video clips may have been the Ricoh RDC-1 in 1995.
1999 saw the introduction of the Nikon D1, a 2.74 megapixel camera that was the first digital
SLR developed entirely by a major manufacturer, and at a cost of under $6,000 at introduction was
affordable by professional photographers and high-end consumers. This camera also used Nikon Fmount lenses, which meant film photographers could use many of the same lenses they already
owned.

What Is Digital Photoshop

Digital photography uses an array of electronic photodetectors to
capture the image focused by the lens, as opposed to an exposure
on photographic film. The captured image is then digitzed and stored
as a computer file ready for digital processing, viewing, digital
publishing or printing.
Until the advent of such technology, photographs were made by
exposing light sensitive photographic film, and used chemical photographic processing to develop and
stabilize the image. By contrast, digital photographs can be displayed, printed, stored, manipulated,
transmitted, and archived using digital and computer techniques, without chemical processing.
Digital photography is one of several forms of digital imaging. Digital images are also created by nonphotographic equipment such as computer tomography scanners and radio telescopes. Digital images
can also be made by scanning other photographic images.

History
The first recorded attempt at building a digital camera was in 1975 by Steven Sasson, an engineer at
Eastman Kodak. It used the then-new solid-state CCD image sensor chips developed by Fairchild
Semiconductor in 1973. The camera weighed 8 pounds (3.6 kg), recorded black and white images to a
cassette tape, had a resolution of 0.01 megapixels (10,000 pixels), and took 23 seconds to capture its
first image in December 1975. The prototype camera was a technical exercise, not intended for
production.
The first true digital camera that recorded images as a computerized file was likely the Fuji DS-1P of
1988, which recorded to a 16 MB internal memory card that used a battery to keep the data in
memory. This camera was never marketed in the United States, and has not been confirmed to have
shipped even in Japan.
The first commercially available digital camera was the 1990 Dycam Model 1; it also sold as
the Logitech Fotoman. It used a CCD image sensor, stored pictures digitally, and connected directly to
a computer for download.

The first flyby spacecraft image of Mars was taken from Mariner 4 on July 15, 1965 with a camera
system designed by NASA/JPL. It used a video camera followed by a digitizer, rather than a mosaic of
sensor elements, so it was not what we usually define as a digital camera, but it produced a digital
image that was stored on tape for later slow transmission back to earth.