At the risk of sounding a smart a**, surely the space race give us the first digital cameras?From: Adam Woolfitt Subject: [PRODIG] The First Digital Camera I was recently asked "What was the first digital camera "?(This is for a Book of "Firsts".) I said it was the Sony Mavica which (according to Sony's website) appeared in 1981, although Sony call it an electronic camera. It recorded it's pictures on a floppy disk and I remember that it seriously startled the trade at that time. Can anyone throw further light on this? Am I wrong? Was there an earlier one?
When John Glenn flew in the first Mercury capsule in 1962, photography was something of an afterthought. It was decided only a day or so before the mission to include a camera on the trip. NASA didn't see photography as being that important back then. By the way, does David Simons qualify as the first man in space? He reached the very edge of the earth's atmosphere, 20 miles up in a balloon, 5 years before Glenn and 4 years before Gagarin. But I digress, the early spy satellites sent their film-shot photographs back to earth in capsules that were scooped up and processed back on earth. But throughout the sixties the digital imaging technology progressed to enable satellites to transmit good resolution photographs back to earth and not just from low earth orbit but from the moon as well. Jodrell Bank intercepted a transmission of the first photos of the moon from Luna 9 in 1966 and scooped the Russians by publishing them in a British newspaper first. And remember, all the magnificent photos sent back from the Voyager missions were taken using digital cameras that were designed before 1977. But I think these were greyscale chips and may have used sequential exposures using colour filters. But these were definitely more than video chips modified to capture single shot images and the technology of this time must have led on to the development of the chips we use today.
Martin Evening Photography <www.martinevening.com>
Co-listowner ProDIG discussion list <http://www.prodig.org>
Author of Adobe Photoshop 7.0 for Photographers
<www.photoshopforphotographers.com>
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