Kodak's 1975 Digital Camera 140
Posted
by
timothy
from the hardly-any-megapixels-a'tall dept.
from the hardly-any-megapixels-a'tall dept.
pickens writes "The NY Times reports on a digital camera put together at Kodak's Elmgrove Plant labs in Rochester, NY during the winter of 1975 from a mishmash of lenses and computer parts and an old Super 8 movie camera that took 23 seconds to record a single digital image to its cassette deck and using a customized reader could display the image on an old black and white television. Called 'Film-less Photography,' it took a 'year of piecing together a bunch of new technology' to create the camera which ran off 'sixteen nickel cadmium batteries, a highly temperamental new type of CCD imaging area array, an a/d converter implementation stolen from a digital voltmeter.' When the team of technicians presented the camera to Kodak audiences they heard a barrage of curious questions including — 'Why would anyone ever want to view his or her pictures on a TV?'"
Link to the orginal article (Score:5, Informative)
http://pluggedin.kodak.com/post/?id=687843 [kodak.com]
The date there is October 16, 2007
News? Hardly.
Re:Kodak: credit where credit is due (Score:2, Informative)
They didn't really shelve it, they continued to invest in the development of the digital photography and made many achievements. They improved the CCDs a lot, built the digital part of the first professional SLRs (using bodies from Nikon and later Canon). However they were unable to keep the pace and were soon surpassed by the Japanese companies
Ironically Kodak contributed a lot to the technology that in the end made their traditional business obsolete.
Re:Kodak: credit where credit is due (Score:4, Informative)
Kodak makes a ton of sensor for other camera companies, including some of the best, high-end medium format sensors in the game. None of the film manufacturers has done as well in the digital arena: Agfa, Konica, etc. Fuji's doing pretty well, but then they make fine lenses for medium (hasselblad uses them) and large format.
Re:They should have released it right there and th (Score:5, Informative)
Slashdot needs some perspective, more importantly needs people that remember 1975, this was 3 to 4 years before the first true home VCR's hit the market, and about 5 years before the first home color video cameras for those VCR's each with a price tag starting at over $1,000 and weighed in together at a weight that would earn an overweight penalty for modern airline luggage weight limits. Kodak cameras in this time period were being driven by a need to compete for what the masses wanted, namely small and instant, with little regard to quality, the 110 instamatic with its easy to load cartridge film was quickly becoming a household norm, and this was only a year before Kodak introduced its own doomed line of instant cameras (recalled after Kodak lost its lawsuit with Polaroid a few years later).
Re:A giant with clay legs (Score:3, Informative)
but they made a terrible business decision not to expand their traditional offerings, thinking film would last forever
No, they saw digital coming, and they tried to get on board. The problem they faced was that every camera manufacturer saw the same thing and all were rushing to bring digital cameras to the market. Kodak was never really a camera company, their main business was film and chemicals; they knew there was nothing they could do to stop that business line from shrinking as digital cameras became available to the masses. Kodak has a share of the digital camera market but they have to compete with companies known to consumers as camera manufacturers such as Canon and Nikon.
Re:A giant with clay legs (Score:3, Informative)
They did way too little, way too late. They had a very powerful brand, but they failed to reinvent themselves in the consumers' eyes because they didn't see digital as a big enough threat to their existing business.
Re:Hey, at least they asked good questions (Score:4, Informative)
Yes. Before I had a CD burner or a DVD player, I did that regularly. My old Kodak 2 megapixel camera could actually do a slideshow.
Re:A piece of history (Score:2, Informative)
Well I'm one of those 'still clinging onto that idea'.
I'll take your example - can you show me an artistic photograph that uses this photo-stacking technique? As a keen photographer myself, I do not see the point of it - it would require using a tripod in order that the images are perfectly aligned, if that is the case, then a long shutter speed combined with a small aperture would achieve the same, and without any artefacts due to the slight changes in focal length seen in many lenses when refocused.
I think the public perception of film is stunted by the cheap ways film used to be dealt with in your local processing lab - processed in a non-dust free environment, and scanned by poor quality machines with poor quality operators. In actual fact 'flim' itself has a tremendous capacity to capture information, and if one is willing to take a small amount of effort to maximise information obtained from the film, one would find very high resolution (35mm captures around the equivalent of a 24mp dslr - see link below), excellent dynamic range, which has a curved shoulder allow colours to fade smoothly into white when overexposued, tonality (see the 7D versus fuji velvia - it's not just the resolution, but also the colour accuracy and colour resolution).
http://photo.net/film-and-processing-forum/00WErk?start=200 [photo.net]
This article looks more at the non-resolution aspects of film:
http://www.twinlenslife.com/2009/05/digital-vs-film-real-deal-nikon-d300-vs.html [twinlenslife.com]
And Ken Rockwell, as much as he says things clearly thinking it through, has an excellent article with many more valid points here:
http://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/why-we-love-film.htm [kenrockwell.com]
Now please do not reply with one of the comparisons which confirmed in a large number of peoples minds that digital was superior, without 1st quoting what scanner was used to do the comparison, and if it isn't a drum scanner, you are already standing on shaky ground.
Duncan.
P.S. Of course buying a Nikon D3X is more convenient and probably cheaper than using a 35mm film camera and sending your photos off for drum scanning, but that is not what we're discussing. I have no problem with people stating that digital is cheaper and more convenient with quality nearly up there with film.
Re:Typical. (Score:3, Informative)
The exposure would have been pretty much instantaneous, even with the limitations of 1975 analog-to-digital conversion technology. The 23 seconds was to write that data to a cassette, which required rather low bandwidth read/write.
Yea but interesting (Score:3, Informative)
Slashdot isn't "digg". I didn't read about that story until today, I don't care whether it was written in 2007 or even 1997.
Story fits well to today where trendy idiots think Kodak is some patent trolling company who didn't invent anything. Perhaps, it may educate them a bit.
Funny that, one of their "failed" "old" devices format is still in use today, completely open and there is no way you will do anything without using that format in pro/movie.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cineon [wikipedia.org]
It was some amazing technology for that time but was way too high end, only Hollywood could afford it. Its format, which was always open/documented is still in use today.
Re:Hey, at least they asked good questions (Score:3, Informative)
I still do that whenever I'm traveling - it's pretty nice to be able to show my grandparents I took over the day on their large-ish TV rather than my 12" Thinkpad or the camera screen. They do have a DVD player nowadays, but still why bother with burning the photos to the DVD unless I want them to keep it? The video-out on my Panasonic works very well for a slideshow.
Re:Kodak: credit where credit is due (Score:4, Informative)
Which is too bad, because they did a lot of things to advance photography over the years, not least of which was introducing it to "the masses". I guess now that I think about it, that's what they're still trying to do now with their cheap digital cameras that are fairly decent.
WHAT cheap digital cameras that are fairly decent? I owned one Kodak digital camera (not a particularly cheap one, either) and the interface was so bad and so slow that I decided never to give them any of my money again. I've bought four digitals since and didn't even THINK of reading the reviews for the Kodaks, let alone purchasing one.
Re:Kodak: credit where credit is due (Score:1, Informative)
Seconded. Or (looking at your post mod history), I guess thirded. I've owned two; one had a clunky mechanical switch that wore out, both took unique USB cords instead of standard USB-mini plugs so you had to pay Kodak more to get a replacement, special Kodak batteries (one of which actually came with a battery but only to discover after opening it up that the battery was a non-rechargeable Lithium battery instead of a rechargeable Li-Ion battery (it said on the outside that the battery was lithium but I guess you just had to already know that a lithium digital camera battery is use-once-disposable), oh and they recorded sub-par digital video in the QuickTime MOV encapsulation so that you had to buy QuickTime Pro in order to do practically anything with them (at the time there weren't so many alternatives as now). I'm planning on buying a digital camera in the next week or two and I wouldn't even consider giving Kodak any more of my money.
I'm biased, though, so if you want to get a more unbiased review you could always ask the better business bureau. Kodak left the BBB to avoid an investigation on how terrible their warranty support and customer relations were.