"History of digital camera"

Digital camera

The camera in your pocket is pretty amazing. Today's smartphone cameras feel like they're a million miles away from earlier photography tech, but digital cameras had to start somewhere. Back in the 20th century when cameras needed film, digital camera technology began as a sat-nav for astronauts. Since then, Kodak, Apple and many others have played important roles in developing today's pocket-sized marvels. Let's dive into digital camera history to mark the milestone devices and the groundbreaking tech.

The beginnings The history of the digital camera started in 1961 with Eugene F. Lally of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. When he wasn't working on artificial gravity, he was thinking about how astronauts could figure out their position in space by using a mosaic photosensor to take pictures of the planets and stars. Lally actually figured out how to solve red eye in photos, but unfortunately his theory of digital photography was still way ahead of the existing technology. It was the same story 10 years later when Texas Instruments employee Willis Adcock came up with a proposal for a filmless camera (US patent 4,057,830). It wasn't until 15 years later that the digital camera became a reality.

Тhe first actual digital still camera was developed by Eastman Kodak engineer Steven Sasson in 1975. He built a prototype (US patent 4,131,919) from a movie camera lens, a handful of Motorola parts, 16 batteries and some newly invented Fairchild CCD electronic sensors. The resulting camera, pictured in 2007 on its first trip to Europe, was the size of a printer and weighed nearly 4 kilograms. It captured black-and-white images on a digital cassette tape, and Sasson and his colleagues also had to invent a special screen just to look at them.

By the mid-1990s the familiar digital camera shape was established that would last for the next decade or more. In 1995, the Ricoh RDC-1 was the first digital still camera to also shoot movie footage and sound. It had a 64mm (2.5-inch) color LCD screen, and the f/2.8 aperture had a 3x optical zoom. Those remained the baseline specs for compacts for years, but at least the price came down over time. In contrast, the original RDC-1 set you back a hefty $1,500. The big digital revolution was, of course, the camera phone. The Kyocera Visual Phone VP-210 in 1999 and Samsung SCH-V200 in 2000 were the first camera phones. A few months later the Sharp Electronics J-SH04 J-Phone was the first that didn't have to be plugged into a computer. It could just send photos, making it hugely popular in Japan and Korea. By 2003, camera phone sales overtook digital cameras.

In 2012, Nokia made a 41-megapixel smartphone, the Nokia 808 Pure. View. Feature films have been shot on i. Phones, and lightweight consumer drones have taken digital photography to the skies. Today's best camera phones routinely come with two, three or four cameras to capture even better images. Smartphones' computer power also unleashed computational photography, processing technology that vaults over the limits of lenses and image sensors. And the latest buzzword is "pixel binning," used in regard to the Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra 5 G for its huge 108-megapixel cameras.

Spheres of application Nowadays diners in restaurants might greet the arrival of their food with a few excited clicks of their phone to capture that sushi or pizza for posterity. Go back a couple of decades and the idea of showing a friend a picture of a dinner you'd been served earlier would raise eyebrows. One of the most pronounced changes is at concerts and sporting events. Go to see a stadium gig and you'll be confronted by a forest of arms holding cameras aloft. At a football match thousands of little camera flashes speckle the crowd at kick-off and after goals.

The main impact of digital is the sheer number of photographs being taken. If an uncle went to his niece's first birthday in 1985 he might have considered shooting off a single 24 exposure-roll of film a rather generous photographic record. Today, with a digital camera, he would think nothing of taking 100 or 200 photos. In the week of the royal wedding,a survey projectedthat some 327 million pictures relating to the event were likely to be taken on digital cameras. "Photography used to be a bit elitist when I was a kid," says Margolis. "It was very expensive, Dad would have the camera and take the photos. The idea of photography being free is amazing."

Ubiquitous digital cameras turn events that in themselves would be a small story into a worldwide phenomenon. Without the camera phone, internet sensations like thebungee jumper who survived her fall into the Zambezi, or. Fenton the deer-chasing dog, would have been less likely to have been captured. Video cameras could always be found at events where it was known in advance that something interesting was likely to happen. But the rise of the phone camera changed the possible arena of subjects. The "happy slapping" craze of incidents being filmed on phones and distributed online was much discussed in 2005. But serious crimes still result in ugly voyeurism. After a man was stabbed in Glasgow in September last year, it emerged thatonlookers had stood around filmingthe attack rather than going to the man's aid.

How to use camera The first thing you need to do is set the battery to a full charge. Manufacturers often recommend you fully charge your battery for the first time, and subsequently only charge it when fully depleted, to help it maintain its performance. Once the battery is charged and inserted into the camera, the next step will be to insert your memory card - either through a slot at the base of the model, or a door to its side. Then follow the on-screen instructions for setting the date and time. Although you don't necessarily need to do this, it's a good idea to input this information now because the date and time will be stored alongside each image you take, which means at a later date you can find out exactly when you captured a particular image or video. Finally, you should format the memory card - often an SD card - that you've just inserted. This introduces the card to the camera, and creates the necessary folders into which the camera records images and videos.

The card formatting option is located either in a separate tools/maintenance menu (sometimes marked with a spanner symbol) or towards the end of a list of options. You may even need to switch your camera to its playback mode to access this option, so check your user manual to see how it can be found. Once you've found it, follow the on-screen instructions and the camera should format the card within a few seconds. Be aware that this process deletes all the information on a card, so if the card contains anything you want to keep, make sure that you have a copy of it on your computer or elsewhere. Of course, this isn't an issue with new cards, which will be blank to begin with.

Interesting facts about cameras The word camera comes from the latin phrase “camera obscura,” which translates to “dark chamber.” The biggest SLR lens ever made is the Carl Zeiss Apo Sonnar 1700mm. It weighs 564 pounds or 256 kg! It was custom-built for an anonymous wildlife photographer. The most expensive camera ever sold is 1923 Leica O-Series. It went for $2.8 million at auction in Vienna.