First Digital Camera

[sleeping]

Stumbled across this today…

http://pluggedin.kodak.com/post/?id=687843

[lokisbong]

Very cool to see how far the technology has gone in the years since then.

[CauseISaidSo]

It is cool. Especially if you consider what all those parts must’ve retailed for back then and what you could buy with that now.

This will date me, but it reminds me of a series of Circuit Cellar articles by Steve Ciarcia in Byte magazine (back when it was still a magazine, and even before that when it had significant coverage of hardware/homebrew). He took these new-at-the-time DRAM chips, which used CCDs for the transistor memories, and found that if he carefully scraped off the black plastic chip coating to reveal the transistors inside, he could use it as a crude digital imager. I think it had a resolution of something like 64×64 and 16-bits of gray. I’m fairly certain I’ve still got that issue, initially stored away with the intent to build that some day…

[orionid]

When would this type of approach be available to the consumer? Although we attempted to address the last question by applying Moore?s law to our architecture (15 to 20 years to reach the consumer), we had no idea how to answer these or the many other challenges that were suggested by this approach. An internal report was written and a patent was granted on this concept in 1978 (US 4,131,919).

less than one year later

Twelve years earlier

What the second article doesn’t say clearly is that the Samos satellites took a film photo, developed it on-board, digitized it via crude ccd (because at the time, film was faster than ccd, and a camera moving at several thousand mph wasn’t conducive to long exposures), and sent it back to earth via radio. When the NRO was declassified in the late nineties, they had a “take your kids to work” day, and one of the key points was “look – we’ve had digital cameras since 1960. Imagine what we’ve got now!”

/edited several times because bbcode doesn’t like parenthesis in urls.
//fark you wiki and your parenthetical urls.
///frikkin seriously? now your auto-urling the first half but ignoring the latter? So much for being RFC 1738 compliant.
////fark yeah, old school url ascii encoding. haven’t flexed that brain cell in a while.
/////slashies!!!

[CauseISaidSo]

“look – we’ve had digital cameras since 1960. Imagine what we’ve got now!”

I’m sometimes amazed at the resolution of the images on Google Earth/maps, but imagine what the classified version of that looks like.

Regarding the parens, replace ‘(‘ with ‘%28’ and ‘)’ with %29 and you’ll get the bbcode to work:

Twelve years earlier

[ url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samos_%28satellite%29]Twelve years earlier[/url ]

[orionid]

Regarding the parens, replace ‘(‘ with ‘%28’ and ‘)’ with %29 and you’ll get the bbcode to work:

yeah, took me a while to remember/scratch those brain cells. I never memorized those because 1738 said they’re one of the allowed characters.

[Author]

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