What is Digital?

• Digital cameras record images using an electronic sensor and store photos on memory cards. The photos can be viewed on a computer and shared online. Early computers used floppy disks and tape drives to store and record digital information, and so did the first digital camera: the Kodak Prototype CCD. Developed in 1975, the camera used a 100-by-100 pixel digital sensor, or 0.01 megapixels, to record an image onto a digital cassette tape. It took 23 seconds to record a single image.
  
  

Early Days

• Even though Kodak developed digital technology as early as 1975, the digital camera market didn't explode into life until the mid 1980s. The Prototype CCD Digital Camera needed to be attached to a large computer processor and external tape drive to record any images, so it wasn't very portable. The 1970s were dominated by the film-based predecessors to digital SLR cameras that included microprocessors and digital light readers, standard features of DSLR cameras and digital point-and-shoot cameras today. During the 1970s, other important advancements were made in home media technology, including the invention of the 5.25-inch floppy disk and digital discs, precursos to CD technology that would transform media transfer technology and make digital media files, including digital photos, portable.
  
  

Picking Up Speed

• In the early 1980s, CCD technology and mobile media formats converged for the first time in Sony's Mavica Electronic Camera, a magnetic video camera with a 570-by-490 pixel sensor that recorded still images onto magnetic disks resembling 3.5-inch floppy disks. The Mavica needed a special player to display images on a television screen. In the late 1980s, beginning in 1986, Canon and Nikon began dueling over the professional still digital camera market share, a duel that continues. Canon released the RC-701 still video camera and Nikon the SVC prototype. Both cameras recorded to small disks specific to each manufacturer and required special drives to be read by a computer. The two interchangeable lens cameras marked the first commercial digital cameras.
  
  

Media

• The bare bones of digital cameras -- the CCD sensor -- needed to wait for removable media to catch up. Compatibility was a major issue in early digital cameras, as every manufacturer produced its own media storage devices. Some recorded to floppy disks, others used credit card-sized memory cards that required special readers. When flash memory cards hit the market in the early 1990s, digital camera manufacturers began to take advantage. CCDs became larger and more complex, allowing for higher image resolutions. Compact memory became incorporated into digital cameras in the mid 1990s. Although an industry standard has never entirely defined, most currently manufactured digital cameras use compact flash memory-like SD cards and Memory Sticks, which evolved from the memory cards of the early 1990s.