History of Digital Cameras

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History of Digital Cameras

• First there was the camera (19th century)
• Then there was the movie camera
• Then there was the video camera

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History of Digital Cameras

• Then NASA wanted to send pictures back from the
  moon (or wherever they wanted to go)
• But there was analog noise
• So they converted the analog signals to digital

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History of Digital Cameras

• 1972 the first patent for an electronic camera
• 1981 Sony develops the Mavica electronic camera
• Analog video frame capture
• 1986 Kodak develops the first megapixel camera
• Verrrrry expensive and had a 5x7 limitation

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History of Digital Cameras

• 1990 Kodak produces the Photo CD
• A proprietary technology for digitizing slides,
  negatives and prints
• Saved files to a CD
• This popularized digital images
• 1991 Kodak created a 1.3 megapixel (journalists)

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History of Digital Cameras

• Apple develops the first consumer level digital
  camera about the same time
• Digital scan backs and digital capture backs were
  being developed during the 90s for portrait and
  catalog photography

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History of Digital Cameras

• Late 1990s saw the development of 3,4 and 5
  megapixel comsumer and prosumer cameras
• These cameras can produce an 8x10 for less than
  1000

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What is a Digital Camera?

• What is a pixel?
• What is a megapixel?

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What is a Digital Camera?

• 1 megapixel 1,000,000 sensors 1,000,000
  pixels
• The more sensors the finer the detail and the
  larger the print
• Each sensor has three filters
• Red
• Green
• Blue
• Open the shutter and the camera records how much
  of each color recorded on each sensor

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Film Advantages

• Resolution (getting better)
• Shutter Latency
• Capacity (just different)
• Batteries (a real problem)
• Cost (still a factor but dropping)

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Digital Camera Advantages

• Immediacy (see it now)
• Usability (with a computer)
• Reusability (storage card)
• Duplication (every file is the original)
• Adaptability (print or web or email)
• Flexibility (remove a cast, adjust the flash)
• Size (not dependant on the size of the film roll)

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Next week

• What do you really need?