Steven Sasson and Barack Obama Getty If your employee came to you in 1975 and told you he'd invented the digital camera, what would you do? If you were Kodak, the answer was to effectively shove him in a closet and hope the product never reached the mass market.
Steven Sasson went to work for Kodak in 1973, The New York Times reports. He was tasked with figuring out whether a "charged coupled device" (C.C.D.) had any practical application. This led him, through a series of steps, not only to invent the first digital camera but also to invent a device to display it on.
Sasson showed these devices to his bosses at Kodak in 1975. At the time, it took 50 milliseconds to capture the image but 23 seconds to record it to tape, according to the Times. Then Sasson would put the cassette into a player, which would take a further 30 seconds to put up a 100 by 100 pixel black and white image. The Times writes that the device was a strange mishmash of parts: a digital cassette recorder, a Super-8 movie camera, an analog-digital converter, and other components connected through handful of circuit boards.
His bosses were unimpressed. "They were convinced that no one would ever want to look at their pictures on a television set," Sasson told The New York Times.
Sasson tried to convince them that, while the image quality wasn't great at the moment, that would improve rapidly.
He was allowed to keep working on it, over skepticism from his bosses.
Patent drawing for the "Electronic still camera," filed in 1977. Google Patents
In 1989 Sasson and Robert Hills made the first DSLR camera, which wasn't a jury-rigged prototype, but one similar to the ones on the market today. It used memory cards and compressed the image.
Kodak's marketing department, however, resisted it, according to the Times. Sasson was told they "could" sell the camera, but that they wouldn't, for fear it would cannibalize film sales. At the time, Kodak made money off of every step of the photography business. Why give that up?
"When we built that camera, the argument was over," Sasson told The New York Times. "It was just a matter of time, and yet Kodak didn't really embrace any of it. That camera never saw the light of day."
Kodak did make money off of the digital camera patent — billions in fact — until it ran out in 2007. But by the time the company embraced digital, it was too late. Kodak filed for bankruptcy in 2012.
For more on the history of the digital camera and Kodak, you can check out the full profile of Steven Sasson over at The New York Times.
bellevuefineart on May 11st, 2018 at 01:59 UTC »
I was very involved in digital camera development, and worked selling components OEM into places like kodak, Fuji, Canon, Nikon and others. It was clear from the very beginning that both Kodak and Fuji wanted to be in the game in case it really took off, but really didn't want it to take off because they had a photo paper and film business that was dependent on analog cameras.
Kodak didn't even make their own cameras, they bought them from Chinon, or they were made by Chinon. Fuji was using a Smart Chip instead of CF cards or SD because they wanted to control the memory market. They weren't focused on the camera or the result, they were only thinking about revenue streams that would provide easy money - Kodak Patents, Fuji memory, paper, and printers (which neither company made, they only bought them OEM and put their names on them).
Canon and Nikon, on the other hand, were full on into the digital game from day one. Canon was determined to make all its own chips and control the camera from the ground up. You could tell they believed this was the future, and they were going to own it.
I still remember sitting in a meeting in around 1998 in Rochester with Kodak, and both my boss and I said "Kodak is doomed to a slow death". You could see the train wreck coming.
Polaroid was another train wreck you could see coming. I was at Photokina and other camera trade conventions a lot, and one year Polaroid was there with a huge booth with a super nice Harley Davidson and a booth babe you could take pictures with. I was like "what's the gimmick?". So the marketing guy takes my picture, and it develops before my eyes, and I said "it's black and white". And he replies "yeah, we're gonna bring back black and white".
It's pretty easy to see the doom coming. All your top talent starts to leave and go where the action is. Top management looks to hire people that have the same corporate vision, or lack thereof. That's when the really bad sales and marketing people start to come in. Look for washed up old guys, polyester suits and outdated sports cars, like a collection of people in a mid life crisis with bad track records. Their best days, like the company that hired them, are in the rear view mirror.
justinmillerco on May 10th, 2018 at 23:17 UTC »
“It did.” - Narrator
Kingsolomanhere on May 10th, 2018 at 22:53 UTC »
Made billions licensing the patent til it expired in 2007. By 2012 Kodak was bankrupt and 80,000 people lost their jobs.