Kodak's 1975 Digital Camera 140
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?'"
Kodak: credit where credit is due (Score:5, Interesting)
Kodak's image these days is fairly poor; although their digital cameras are pretty popular in the cheap category they're basically non-existent in the professional arena.
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. But of course they used to contribute much to professionals as well, especially good quality film. They never really had high-end cameras that were used professionally, it was really all about the film, so the switch to digital hit them hard.
My uncle worked as head of a research division at Kodak for many years, and still lives in Rochester. I attended the University of Rochester, which back when George Eastman was around got quite a lot of Kodak money and wouldn't be the school it is today without it. So I've had a lot of exposure to Kodak over the years. I've heard of this digital camera before, and other interesting things they've done.
If you're in the area it's definitely worth checking out the George Eastman House museum. It's his rather incredible mansion, turned into a photography museum. I don't remember if I heard about this camera there; possibly not but they do have all kinds of old equipment on display. They also have an attached movie theater, which shows a different classic, art-house, etc. film every single night. I don't live there any more, but as a student I went to their classic film showings all the time. Always on 35mm and great prints. There's a school for film preservation there, and a huge collection of films.
Good question (Score:3, Interesting)
Why would anyone ever want to view his or her pictures on a TV?
Because non-moving images on a TV scare people. That's why the History Channel does that Ken Burns thingy whenever they show a bunch of old pictures narrated by someone with a dull, droning voice. No one would watch it if the picture just sat there, staring back at you like some kind of demon box.
And 12 years later, the movie version (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:First post. (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Typical. (Score:5, Interesting)
What we can learn from this is there's a lot of technology we've have had sooner if industrial design and packaging was a priority, rather than just getting something working for a cool demo, and assuming observers would understand the potential.
Except that neither industrial design nor packaging would have helped Kodak sell this film-less camera.
The problem with this film-less approach, in 1975, was largely one of infrastructure. Just look at the questions:
Why would anyone ever want to view his or her pictures on a TV? Given the technology of the time, it's a valid question. Folks didn't have home computers. TVs were low-resolution. Hell, not even everyone had a TV. Why would you go through the process of lugging around a giant camera and waiting several seconds for it to write to tape just to view a picture on a TV? Why not take a normal picture, get it developed normally, and look at a crisp photo like normal?
How would you store these images? Again, nobody had computers. You couldn't write these tapes to your HDD. You couldn't upload them to a server or burn them to CD. You'd be storing a box of tapes. Why do that when you could just store photos instead?
What does an electronic photo album look like? The answer, of course, is Flickr, but that didn't exist at the time. What would an electronic photo album look like without a computer? It'd have to be another piece of hardware attached to a TV in all likelihood.
The problem wasn't vision... It wasn't packaging... It wasn't marketing... The problem was a lack of digital infrastructure to support electronic photography. The world, at the time, was still essentially analog. Yes, computers existed. Yes, networks existed. But you didn't have the kind of ubiquity that we do today. Today absolutely everything has a fairly high resolution display on it. Today pretty much everything has Internet access. Today you can view those film-less photos on almost anything you want, or print them out easier than you can get a real photo developed. Back in 1975 that just wasn't true.
Why Kodak failed (Score:5, Interesting)
By 1990 Kodak spent another billion dollars just on lawyers fighting Polaroid over patents.
Re:Digital has been around for awhile. (Score:5, Interesting)
A bit closer in time to the Kodak project was an exhibit/activity at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago in (I think) 1978. The subject sat in front of a video camera which fed its signal to a computer, which did an analog-to-digital conversion and produced a "portrait by computer": overprinting characters on a dot-matrix printer to produce the right tonal value for each (rather large) pixel. When I sat for it, this [toddverbeek.com] was the result. I was really into photography (darkroom in the basement, etc), and this helped spark my interest in computers; I started saving my nickels and bought an Atari 400 a couple years later.
Re:Not necessarily (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, and you made my first of two points, so I'm just replying to your post, and will make my second point of why 1975 was not the right time for digital cameras:
In 1975, we were still living in the era of scarcity. If you read Little House on the Prairie, you see what we would now consider abject poverty that they had in the nineteenth century -- hand-held slates because paper was too expensive; Ma's "china shepherdess", her sole knick-knack, that she carted around whenever they moved, children going barefoot so as to not wear out their Sunday shoes, etc.
Post-WWII was the first watershed era of abundance, with home appliances, indoor climate control, television, and homes doubling in size from cabins, shacks, and Craftsman bungalows. But still, although there was television, as we are reminded by BTTF, people only had one television. Why would you monopolize the one family television to show photos? Even into the 1980's, again from BTTF, Marty McFly attested to having only two televisions. (Although I am old enough for such personal recollections, I city BTTF merely for more authority than personal anecdotes.)
The second watershed was the influx of Chinese imports from Wal-Mart, really starting around in earnest around 2002 (especially compared to the double-digit increases in housing, education, and healthcare). It was weird to me that stuff was so inexpensive that it became more economic to dispose and replace rather than to preserve and repair items for years. People started buying so, so much stuff, that it became trendy to "live simply" and to "declutter". Enter the digital camera. The digital camera allowed one to clear out those shoeboxes and bulky "albums" of photos and to "de-clutter". People not only had five TVs, they had five computers on which to display photos.
Even though the 1975 lifestyle is recognizable to today's eyes (in contrast to, say, nineteenth century living), everything was still expensive, every purchased item was kept for years and treasured, and the idea of decluttering was not on anyone's radar. In this context, given the high resolution, great color rendition, usability in direct sunlight, and portability of prints, why would anyone want to forgo watching (and prevent the rest of the family from watching) All in the Family to see a photo?
Re:Digital has been around for awhile. (Score:5, Interesting)
Here's a detail [toddverbeek.com] of the above-linked image.
Why not mention Apple? (Score:4, Interesting)
Perhaps you know, Apple did one of the first digital cameras in days when they were really in bad shape (no SJobs).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_QuickTake [wikipedia.org]
They got burned too. It was openly joked about. Kodak could have spent billion dollars but they had some amazing revenue to cover it. Apple didn't. It is more like MS, they don't bother whether XBox loses money or Silverlight is considered as a joke, they can always cover it. They (and Google) can always gamble.
Re:Not necessarily (Score:2, Interesting)
Authoritative fiction!
Re:Not necessarily (Score:3, Interesting)
The average household in 1975 probably did just have one television, but that was one of the last years for which that was true, and households that were "early adopters" probably already had at least a second television in the master bedroom.
By the end of the decade I had a television in my bedroom, albeit a small black and white one at first, and that was as a child in a lower middle class household. My parents did not have one in their bedroom, but then they monopolized the main TV and were far from being "early adopters."
The popularity of instant cameras during this period shows that if a practical digital camera had been available, it probably would have achieved wide acceptance.
Point being that society would have been ready for a digital camera in 1975, if the state of technology had been ready to provide one. It wasn't.
Re:Typical. (Score:4, Interesting)
The concept of funny captioned cat pictures is a bit over 100 years old at least:
http://icanhascheezburger.com/2008/12/01/funny-pictures-oldest-ever-lolcat-found/ [icanhascheezburger.com]
Re:Typical. (Score:3, Interesting)
> If it took 23 seconds for it to record something, it's more of a glorified scanner than an actual camera.
No. That just makes it a very old school camera.
This is what happens when you have neither a vision for tomorrow or a solid grasp of the past.
This tech demo wasn't so much an indication of what was going into production soon but what the future would look like as soon as the tech caught up. This should have been used by management to drive long term strategic direction of the company in terms of decades.
They saw what was coming and had plenty of time to prepare for it.
Re:Typical. (Score:1, Interesting)
Why would anyone ever want to view his or her pictures on a TV?
This one puzzles me because back in those days, some people did take pictures and make slide shows that were displayed on a screen with a projector (a slide projector [wikipedia.org]). Being able to display items on a TV would reduce or eliminate the need for this extra equipment.