Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts. And how the tech are you? So? These days, just about everyone has a digital camera on them pretty much all the time, right, because smartphones have become all things to all people, digital camera, phone, computer, media player, video game device, et cetera. And you know, of course, there are folks out there who still use standalone digital cameras. They're photographers, they're vloggers, their cinematographers, tons of other folks. But it's interesting to me because young people don't know a world that didn't have digital cameras. For those of us of a certain age, we can remember a time when digital cameras were really rare or not even a thing at all. We remember using film cameras. Right. You would take a photo and you would have no idea how it came out until after you developed that film somewhere, and that could be weeks or months or even longer later. If you're like me, you might misplace that canister of film. It might be years before you see that picture, and then you'd say, oh, it was out of focus. Now, like all inventions, it can actually be tricky to figure out where to start. When we're talking about digital cameras, which is what we're really focusing on today. I wanted to think about where did we come from with digital cameras, and I figure one good place to start for digital cameras is eighteen thirty nine. And yeah, that's pretty early. You're not going to find a Fujifilm or a Canon or a Nikon camera in eighteen thirty nine. In fact, you know when you figure that the history of film traces itself back to around eighteen sixteen, eighteen thirty nine is a pretty early date for digital cameras. Really, what I want to talk about is discovery that is key to digital cameras. The actual photography part will come along much later. But it was in eighteen thirty nine when a teenage smarty pants named Edmund Beckerel created a peculiar device. He took an acidic solution and he added silver chloride to it, and then he connected electrodes that were made of platinum to this mixture, and he exposed the whole thing to light, and he observed that when light hit the solution there was a change in voltage, an electrical current would flow through the electrodes. He had discovered the photovoltaic effect, which is the effect of certain materials that change light energy into electrical energy, the same thing that's the basis for stuff like solar panels. Right now, we're going to jump ahead more than a century, but that discovery would be key for digital cameras. And we can give a quick nod to folks at Bell Laboratories in nineteen forty seven who use semiconductors to invent the point contact transistor. Semiconductors that will remind you are materials that under certain circumstances act as a conductor of electricity and other circumstances act as an insulator. Well, we're going to actually move all the way up to the nineteen sixties and the golden age of the space race. So one of the many brilliant people working on behalf of the United States during the space Race was Eugene F. Lali. He had been interested in photography ever since his childhood. He even developed pund non intended, a method to reduce red eye in color photos, when he was a teenager using a Strobe light After he graduated college with a degree in electrical engineering, he got a job working in the aerospace industry and his focus, which again pund non intended, was on interplanetary space exploration. He worked on proposals for spacecraft design. He proposed features that would make it possible for humans to journey to other planets or moons and such. Now, one of the many challenges of space travel is navigation. There are lots of challenge with space travel, for example, keeping space from killing you, but navigation is definitely one of them, and just knowing where you are in relation to everything else can be a bit of a challenge. There aren't many landmarks out in space, and the road signage is absolutely terrible. So Llli proposed a system that would analyze light from celestial bodies to determine where spacecraft was relative to everything else, essentially saying, oh, I recognize this configuration and based upon the positioning that means you have to be here. You can think of it almost like a star map. And he put together a scientific paper on the subject, and he titled it Mosaic Guidance for Interplanetary Travel, and he presented his work at the nineteen sixty one convention of the American Rocket Society. Now, Lali's proposal was to create a special kind of ship, a mosaic of photo detectors or photodiodes or photo sites, you can think of it as any of those terms. So these would collect light, they would then convert that light to an electrical current, and then a computer system would analyze the current coming from all these different photo detectors to make sense of it all. And essentially Lolly was describing a type of photosensor that you would find in digital cameras. Now, his idea was ahead of its time. It was solid as far as the concept goes, but it would take several years before anyone was ready to try and make something similar to what he described in his paper. But it was absolutely on point. In fact, it would take a little more than a decade before someone else built upon Lolly's idea as far as digital cameras are concerned. An engineer with Texas Instruments named Willis Adcock filed a patent in nineteen seventy two for a filmless camera, or, as the patent called it, an quote electronic photography system end quote. Now. Adcock's patent described the invention as again quote, a completely electronic system for recording and subsequently displaying still life pictures include an optical electronic transducer for generating electronic signals responsive to an optical image. Now, in case you're not familiar with the term transducer, this refers to any sort of device that converts one form of energy to a different form of energy, So in this case, the device would convert light energy into electrical energy. Now, keep in mind the nineteen seventy two pre dates the era of personal computers, so Adcock's description of his invention references television sets as the display system for his invention. He explains in the patent that the electronic photographic device would sidestep the need for film, which also means there's no need to develop whatever medium you're using to capture the image. In this case, you know it's electrical currents, not a physical film. Adcock puts forward that this would mean his invention would be less expensive and more efficient than film cameras, which is hard to argue. Right though, it is a bit odd to think of just using your television set to view your photos. So Adcock's version also didn't make it to the consumer market. But folks around this time started to experiment with early test designs for digital cameras, and one such person was Steve Sassin. He had joined Eastman Kodak as an engineer in nineteen seventy three and put together a prototype digital camera. So the sensor he used fell into the category of CCD, which stands for charge coupled device. These were first invented back in nineteen sixty nine, and it's the CCD's job to capture light, to convert that light to an electrical charge, and to send that as data to the camera's processor. But it actually has to go through a few more steps. Has to go through an analog to digital converter first, because electrical charge is an analog signal, right, It's continuous, it's not made up of binary steps. So you have to convert that analog signal to a digital one in order to process it with a computer processor. It does get way more complicated than why I just described, but you get the general idea. Now. The way CCD works is that the charge created by the chip depends entirely on the intensity of light that's hitting a specific part of the CCD. So the order of operations is that when you push the button on a camera in order to take an image, a shutter opens up for a moment. Now, the shutter otherwise blocks light coming in from the optics of the camera the lenses that are designed to focus light so that it hits the CCD when the shutter is open, So light comes in, it's focused by the lenses, it's passed through the gap created by the shutter opening. This is also known as the aperture. By the way, you can actually set the aperture to different values in order to allow more or less light through. So the aperture, along with the shutter speed, will adjust the exposure of your image and then the light will hit the CCD. So a CCD, if you were to get a microscope out and take a look at it, it would look like a little grid of squares, and each square in that grid is a photovoltaic component that can transform light energy into an electrical current. It is a photo site or photodiode. One thing I didn't know about CCDs before this episode is how they are wired, or rather how they aren't wired in a way. So you might think, as I did, that each individual square is wired to transfer the electrical current it generates to a processor, you know, through a pathway. But that's not the case. And the reason for that is because if you did do it that way, you would potentially ruin the image you were trying to take. And this is because of leakage, that is electrical leakage. So the densely packed tiny wires would leak electrical charge and your finalized image would have flaws in it, like streaks or striations. Now I wasn't familiar with that issue, so big thanks to an eleven year old YouTube video from engineer Guy for pointing it out. Now, interestingly, this does contrast it with a different kind of image sensor, which actually predates the CCD, But we'll get to that. So if you're not wiring these individual squares so that they each go to a processor, how does this work? How can a CCD transfer charge so that it can be processed well? As engineer Guy explains, a CCD is made of silicon, and in the manufacturing process, engineers add insulating sections to divide up the silicon into rows. So you have these dividing lines that separate each row from one another, and because it's insulated, the charge cannot pass across this gap. Now, to create columns, engineers would add strips of metal, typically aluminum, so each square is insulated from its neighbors in channel stops. That's what's called And when light hits this array of squares or photo sites, each of these squares builds up an electrical charge relative to the intensity of light that hit it. So if one square was hit with more intense light, it's going to have a different charge than that one that just got a tiny bit of light. But collectively, all of these squares capture an image in the form of an electrical charge at this point. But to transfer that charge and turn it into data, the CCD shifts the image across the strips of alumnum or whatever other metal might have been used. So it's kind of like the image is moving row by row across the CCD To transfer to the camera's memory. You get a row of charges that gets transferred through an analog to digital converter and goes to the processor, and the next row moves in, so it's like bottom row is gone, next row comes down. Sort of thing, not necessarily bottom, but you get the idea. But it reminds me of how in the bad old days of dial up internet, you would go to a web page and if it had images on it, you would watch as the image would load one row of pixels at a time. It's kind of like that, except in this case we're talking about shifting charges off a grid of photosites and into memory one row at a time. Also, the electrical signal again passes through an amplifier, so it's an analog. It goes through an amplifier than an analog to digital converter, and this is in order to have a signal strong enough to be able to actually scan. Now, remember a pixel is a point of light, so each of these photosites is corresponding to a pixel in the image. So a digital image consists of lots of these little points of light, and collectively they represent the overall picture. The more densely packed you have pixels of light, and the more pixels that are there, generally speaking, the smoother the picture is. If you have fewer pixels, it's going to be a clunky picture. And I always describe this as imagine you've got a collection of wooden blocks and they're of different colors, and you're instructed to make an image of a let's say it's a flower using these wooden blocks. And let's say that the woodenlo are you know, an inch to a side, and you've got you know, enough to be able to make a picture, well an inch to a side, it's probably going to be a pretty clunky looking flower, unless you're building so that you're taking an image from like twenty stories up or something. So then let's say that you were given blocks that were half an inch to a side, and you've got more blocks now to build an image of a flower. Well, that flower is probably going to look a little less blocky than the first one, let's say a quarter inch to a side, and so on and so on. As the pixels get smaller and you're able to pack them more densely together, the resulting image you get is of a higher resolution. In order to make that happen, these CCDs have to have a grid of photo sites that are corresponding to all those pixels, so keep that in mind. By the way, the CCD, like I said, is not the only type of sensor for digital photography. The other major type is called a complementary metal oxide semiconduct And in this context, complementary doesn't mean the sensor says, hey, you're looking sharp. Let's take a photo. The initialism for this phrase is ce moss CMOS, and when we come back we'll talk more about how a sea moss works and how it is fundamentally different from CCD. We'll also mention again that SEAMS predates CCD. But before we get into all that, let's take a quick break to think our sponsors. Okay, we're back and we're going to talk about ce MOS. So, like a CCD, a SEAMS sensor converts you know, photons of light into an electrical charge, But unlike a CCD, each photodiode or pixel in a sea moss sensor has its own amplifier, so these are individually wired, whereas CCDs aren't. So rather than scanning the charge just one row at a time, a SEAMAS sensor sends an amplified signal from each photo site to an analog to digital converter. Now this means that SEMAS sensors create more noise than CCD sensors visual noise right, That means you can get some artifacts due to electrical leakage. Even so, SEMAS sensors are really prominent in embedded vision applications in fact, they've overtaken CCDs. Now. One reason for that is that SEMAS sensors draw less power than CCDs, so you can extend battery life for example, which is you know, that's a big deal, or you can make it a smaller battery. Either way, right, you can either say, well, i can use a smaller battery because I'm not drawing as much power, so I can have just as much charge, but I can reduce the weight of the overall unit. If we're talking about a headset, that's a big deal, right if you're going to be wearing that for hours. Or conversely, you could say, well, we're going to keep the battery the same size, but now we'll be able to power the device longer than we could if we were to use a CCD sensor. SEMAS sensors are also far less expensive than CCDs, so that make them makes them a really attractive option when you're trying to keep product prices under control, unless you're Apple, in which case you just crank that number up as high or even higher than the market will allow. Anyway, for the early days of digital cameras, CCDs were really where it was at. It would take years of work to mitigate the issues with noise reduction in seams technology for those sensors to really catch up and then take the lead. So a lot of the rest of this episode is really going to be about devices that used CCD sensors. Just know that eventually Sea Moss took their place. Now back to Sassin, right if you forgot. He's the guy I talked about before the break. He's the one who built an early prototype digital camera. So his boss, Gareth Lloyd, had suspected that the charge coupled device or CCD might make a practical use in photography, so he gave Sassin a dream assignment. He said, you know, see what you can do with this thing. See if you can make something out of it. Because Sassin had a background in electrical engineering, and while he was working for Kodak, people were worried that he would get into trouble because he was apparently very curious kind of guy, as in curious as in how does this work? Not man? That guy is weird. So Sassin has said that hardly anyone knew about his project, but it wasn't because it was some sort of top secret project. Instead, it was seen in such a small operation that no one really knew it was going on, just you know. Was also not a straight path from assignment to complete a project. He said it was a lot of learning and a lot of mistakes along the way, and that often he questioned the wisdom of agreeing to do the project in the first place. But in December nineteen seventy five he had himself a prototype and his camera was a bit of a Frankenstein's monster, so he had salvaged a lens from a Super eight film camera. The circuitry mixed analog and digital elements, or he had to include an analog digital converter in this as well. The CCD array was also part of this. Obviously, there was more than a dozen nickel cadmium batteries to power the thing, and it weighed nearly nine pounds, pretty hefty for a digital camera. You would not want to carry one of those around on casual outings. It had no mechanical shutter. Assassin did incorporate an electronic shutter with a shutter speed of one twentieth of a second, and he discovered that the CCD was sensitive to infrared light and that this would sometimes cause issues when he was taking images indoors, so he also added an infrared filter to block IR out. As for memory, while he decided to go straight to storage, he used a tape assembly as in magnetic tape, so it worked on a principle similar to audio cassettes or VHS tapes or cam quarters old tape based camquarders. There are pictures of this prototype online. You should check it out if you are curious, because it really does look like of Frankenstein's monster. It is an odd collection of parts. The digital camera could capture images at a resolution of one hundred pixels by one hundred pixels, so in my example of using wooden blocks, it would be as if you had, you know, ten thousand blocks in order to make a picture, and it could be one hundred blocks per side. So yeah, the full image would be approximately ten thousand pixels. Much later we would talk about digital camera resolution in terms of megapixels or millions of pixels. So ten thousand pixels is a far cry from what we would see with consumer digital cameras or the kind that's even in your phone. But you know, it was a start, and we'll get back to megapixels. As it turns out when you hear a camera has a fifteen megapixel sensor in it or whatever. That doesn't necessarily mean that all those pixels are going to end up in the final image. But we'll get back to that. So Sassin showed off his work to his colleagues over at Kodak, and he took photos with this very weird camera and then he popped the tape out of the camera and inserted it into a playback device that was connected to a television, so again similar to something like a VCR. He showed how the images would display on the TV screen and his peers they thought it was interesting, but they didn't really see a practical application. I mean, who the heck would want to look at their photos on their television? To them, it seemed impractical and unrealistic. Keep in mind, this is still really before personal computers had taken off, so Assassin's work was largely dismissed. It's also worth pointing out that Kodak was very much in the film business, so not only did film seem to be the winning strategy at the time, it was the crux of their entire enterprise. The company had an incentive to dismiss digital photography because digital photography doesn't need film or processing or development. You don't need any of that. It's all the stuff that was the foundation of Kodak's business. So you could argue that Kodak partly ignored digital photography because it it was really inconvenient to its established business strategy. I've heard similar arguments made against certain car companies and their slow move to develop fully electric vehicles that because that was inconvenient to their business strategy, they purposefully ignored it and then got left behind. Anyway, while Sassin's invention was neat, it was really ahead of its time. I mean, in nineteen seventy five, we're just getting into the very earliest days of personal computers, for goodness sakes, and at that time really only nerdy hobbyists were into PCs. While Kodak arguably made a big old whoopsie by not pursuing digital photography earlier, you can hardly blame the company for not embracing a tech that just didn't really have a place in the industry just yet. Sassin would still work on R and D with digital cameras, as did other engineers around the world. One problem that needed solving was how to capture color because the CCD could convert light to electrical current, but there was no information about color in that signal, so you would end up with a black and white photograph. To get color, you would need to add a filter of some sort and then program a processor to interpret the charges coming through in order to add color to the final image. So typically you would do this with a mosaic of filters, and you would have rows that often would alternate red and green squares at the top row, and then the next row would be blue and green squares, and then back to red and green and so on, and so you would just have this grid of little squares alternating between these colors, and each filter would block light of its corresponding color from passing through, so only light from other colors would make it through that filter. So a blue filter blocks blue light and a green filter blocks green light, et cetera. Now this affects the intensity of the light that actually reaches the CCD, and thus it affects the electrical charge. As I said, you have to program the processor to do this, but the processor can interpret these values and apply that rotation to determine the color that each pixel should show. This also involves some error correction. The processor determines each pixel's color in part by comparing it to neighboring pixels, which sounds weird, right, Like you're saying, what color is pixel twelve? Well, let's look at pixels eleven and thirteen, and let's also look above and below this pixel, and all of that together will help us determine what color it should be. But you got to think, well, you have to do this to all the pixels all the same time, right, It's not like you just magically have determined one pixels color. So very interesting stuff. But let's skip ahead to the nineteen eighties now. As I said, numerous engineers worked on advancing digital camera technology, though at this point there really weren't any digital cameras on the market. A few sectors were making use of early digital cameras, but this was like stuff like in you know, high tech military applications and sometimes medical or scientific applications, but it would take a lot more time to become a practical consumer electronic device. Now up in the Great White North. That's an affectionate term for Canada, in case you're not familiar with that phrase. The University of Calgary's science team designed a digital camera to take pictures of the sky to catch the northern lights you know, auroras. In other words, they used CCDs similar to what Sassin had used, the old one hundred by one hundred pixel kind, and their design was all digital. They didn't have analog circuits like Sassin's design did, although they still had to you know, convert stuff, because electrical current is still an analog signal. Ultimately, well, in the mid nineteen eighties, the Japanese company Nikon created the first digital single lens reflex camera or DSLR camera. However, this prototype, called the Nikon SVC, which stood for still video Camera, wasn't entirely digital. It used an analog format for media storage. Still, Nikon's work would lead to an incredibly popular form factor a few years down the road. And you might owe, my Drew Giz wonder what a digital single lens reflex camera even means. Now you've definitely seen them, you might own one, you might use one all the time, But what makes a DSLR camera? Well, to answer that, it's good to first just focus on the SLR part, because those cameras predated the digital kind. We had film based ones, so a single lens reflex camera uses a peculiar arrangement of mirrors so that the photographer can see through the viewfinder and they're looking exactly at what they're about to capture when they snap a photo. I'll see if I can explain it here. It is tricky without visual aids. But light comes inside the camera through the lens right, so the lens focuses light into the camera. Now, normally it would just aim this light back toward the aperture, but in front of the aperture is a mirror that's angled, so it reflects light upward into the camera toward the viewfinder. Now, the light doesn't go straight to the viewfinder. Instead, the light hits what's called a penta mirror, and as the name implies, pina mirror, it is a five sided mirror. This mirror bounces the light around so that it can aim correctly for the viewfinder as well as you know, not be all upside down and reversed and everything. This allows the photographer to see the scene as it is seen through the lens, and that means that they have a clear idea of what they're about to capture. Now, this is in contrast to other kinds of cameras which might use a separate set of optics just for the viewfinder, which means the photographer is seeing the image through a different optical path than what is going to hit the film, so you can you can have some discrepancies there, But with this approach, the SLR approach, you're looking at the exact same light that is ultimately going to hit your medium, whether it's film or a CCD or SEMAS. So snapping a photo means that the first reflecting mirror, the one that it captures the light from the lens and knocks it up to the penta mirror. That mirror actually moves out of the way as the shutter opens, and that lets light pass beyond the mirror, go past the shutter, go through the aperture, and then hit the exposed medium at the end of the sequence. You know, at the end of this moment, the mirror moves back in place and the shutter closes of the film advances. So for just a second, when you do snap that picture, you no longer have a visual pathway through that optical lens through the viewfinder, so your view is shut off for a moment. With digital SLRs, like I said, the whole process is the same. It's just instead of film, you're exposing a CCD or C moss to light. But the basic concept is otherwise identical. A series of mirrors provides the photographer a view of what they're about to capture, and it's pretty darn neat all, right. But we also had the phrase still video camera, right, that was what Nikon was using an SVC, So what the heck is that? Well, in the nineteen eighties, one line of research that pre dates the consumer digital camera was to capture still images as if they were a single frame of video. So each still photo would be a single frame in a video as if you were shooting video itself. Those frames could be stored on magnetic tape, similar to vhs. These were not digital cameras because they stored information in analog format, and they didn't become popular consumer products either. It was more like a developmental step toward digital cameras. They bridged a gap between purely analog and purely digital and film and digital. They had some limited use in the late eighties and early nineties, primarily in things like journalism, so they were being used in various industries. They just weren't making their way to the consumer market now. According to CNET, what should have been the first handheld digital camera was the Fuji DS one P, which was produced in nineteen eighty eight, and it would store images in digital file formats and save to a memory car holding sixteen whole megabytes of storage space. But this camera never graduated into becoming an actual product. Instead, the first digital camera sold in the US as a consumer product was the Diecam Model one, also known as the Logitech Photo Man in nineteen ninety. We'll talk more about this early digital camera after we take a quick break to thank our sponsors. So we're back and we're talking about the Diecam Model one, the first digital camera sold in the United States. Keep in mind there are other cameras that were sold in other parts of the world, but I'm based in the US, so there's the bias, and I'm guessing there wasn't a ton of confidence behind this new technology. According to the Digital Camera Museum, the Diecam Model one shipped in quote unquote plane boxes and that they typically have very small serial numbers. Like their serial numbers are four days, digits and lengths, which indicates a pretty small number of them were ever manufactured. Right, If you think that limits you up to zero zero zero zero to nine nine ninety nine, well that's ten thousand units. That's not very many, and that's if you use every single variation of the four digits for that serial number. The manufacturer suggested retail price for the Diecam Model one was a hefty nine hundred and ninety five dollars. Now keep in mind this is nineteen ninety, so we have to adjust for inflation. If we do that, then that means the Diecam Model one would cost around twenty four hundred dollars today. Not unheard of for digital cameras. I mean, there are some out there that are much more expensive, but yeah, pretty hefty price tag. This camera had a massive whole single megabyte of storage space. That's me being a little cheeky there. As for image resolution, it was just three hundred and seventy two by two hundred forty pixels, which if you multiply those together that means total you get eighty nine two hundred eighty pixels. So still nowhere closed to the megapixel range. Now, this is a good time to talk about stuff like resolution and megapixels. As I mentioned, earlier. Just because the device might be marketed as having a certain number of megapixels doesn't mean that every single pixel is actually used in the final image that you capture. Some of those pixels might be used for things like error correction and image stabilization in the processing phase, so it leaves you with fewer pixels to make up the actual image itself. So, for example, according to Canon's website, the Canon PowerShot V ten is marketed as a twenty point nine megapixel sensor camera. However, if you're shooting video, you actually end up with a thirteen point one megapixel resolution video, and if you're shooting still images, then those images are going to have fifteen point two megapixels. So while the camera has twenty point nine megapixels on the sensor, none of those megapixels are actually making it to the final images. I don't think it's really as big a deal these days, but once upon a time, megapixels was kind of shorthand for digital camera quality, which was a bit misleading, and generally speaking, people thought, Okay, a bigger number is better, right, that just makes it easy. So that meant if you were looking in the store and you had two different digital camera boxes in front of you, and one of them says it's a ten megapixel digital camera, and the other one says it's a twelve megapixel camera. Well, clearly the twelve megapixel has to be superior. Except it's not as simple as that, because the megapixel thing really does just describe resolution, and it's true that lower resolution images are more blocky and not as smooth as higher resolution pictures, So it does matter. Resolution does matter, But once you get beyond a certain point, then you're not really likely to notice a change in resolution unless you're taking an image and then you're zooming into extreme levels, like you're doing a massive digital zoom into the image, or if you're taking that digital image and then you want to print it out and you're going to blow it up into like a banner or something, then you're going to be able to notice a real difference in resolution. But beyond that, you're probably not going to be able to tell the difference between two different high resolution cameras. Other features like color representation and contrast, which is the difference between the brightest colors and the darkest colors, these things can make a huge difference in image quality, so it's not just resolution, and it's quite possible for a camera that has a sensor with fewer photo sits on it to still produce better images than one that has a metric buttload of photo sits on its sensor. Anyway, in parallel with the development of digital cameras came file formats like JPEGs, and also you got photo editing software like Photoshop or digital Darkroom, and so everything was kind of converging toward digital cameras becoming a viable consumer product in the early nineteen nineties, although most of them were still wicked expensive, so a lot of folks like yours truly stuck with film cameras for several more years. In nineteen ninety four, Apple even got into the act. Apple released a digital camera. You might not have known that that Apple had a digital camera. Once upon a time, you could buy an Apple branded digital camera and it wasn't part of a phone. It was called the Apple Quick Take one hundred at least the original was, and it boasted a resolution of six hundred and forty by four hundred eighty pixels. Now I did say Apple branded. I did not say Apple built, because, as it turns out, the Apple Quick Take one hundred was actually made by Kodak, the company that had kind of slept on digital photography. The two hundred, the Apple Quick Take two hundred would actually be made by Fujifilm. So this was kind of in a dark time for Apple. The company would be in a rather slow decline until Steve Jobs would return to the company in nineteen ninety seven and really shake things up again. And it would actually take a few years for Apple to find its footing. So you'd be forgiven if you didn't know that Apple released a digital camera back at this time, because the company was seen as something of a joke in the industry. Scenet's Richard Trenholm documents that in nineteen ninety four, Olympus produced a camera called the Deltis VC eleven hundred, which you could connect to a modem so you could actually send digital photos online. That's pretty early for ninety four. I mean, it's amazing, as Trenholm rits, quote, it took about six minutes to transmit an image end quote Yahalza, and we're still talking about relatively low resolution images here, because the camera had a max resolution of seven hundred and sixty eight by five hundred and seventy six pixels. As the nineteen nineties went on, digital cameras would creep further into the consumer marketplace, though for a lot of us, film was still the way to go because digital cameras were still pretty expensive. I would argue that the real seed change would be when cameras found their way into cellular phones, which happened at the close of the decade. So there were cheaper digital cameras that would come out over the nineteen nineties. I mean I even finally bought one late in the nineties, but they were pretty primitive. They were like point and shoot cameras. You could get professional grade digital cameras, but they were much more expensive and very few people were purchasing them. There were very few reasons to do it. Like we're still talking at an era where it's before social media, and only a few websites were starting to offer things like digital storage for photographs, So where were you going to display your digital images? A lot of people didn't really jump on the bandwagon because there really weren't ways to easily not just take digital photos, but experience them. So things would start to change in the late nineties and nineteen ninety nine, the Kyo Serrah Visual Phone VP two ten came out in Japan. It had a front facing camera and it was people taking images at one hundred and ten thousand pixels and it could hold up to twenty JPEG images. The phone itself was in the candy bar style, complete with physical keys, because this is way before touchscreen phones would become the norm, and you could send the photos via email over Japan's mobile phone network system. It was exclusive to Japan. As far as I can tell, it retailed for around three hundred and twenty five dollars in nineteen ninety nine. If we adjust for inflation, that's like six hundred and ten bucks for today. Not bad, I mean smartphones are much more expensive today. But obviously it would take some time for handset manufacturers to start including digital camera sensors and lenses in mobile phones as kind of a standard option. But really the dye had been cast, and as we edged toward the era of the consumer smartphone and the debut of the Apple iPhone, the writing would be on the wall for digital cameras. Like again, they haven't disappeared and you can still find them, but the smartphone would mean that fewer people would really invest in getting a digital camera, just as fewer people invest in a standard mobile media player, because our phones can do all of that. Right. We can largely thank Apple for this, because the iPhone really did usher in that age, and honestly, I think it's pretty cool. I still think that, you know, digital cameras are awesome, and standalone ones are amazing. It's just that I think most people don't need one. They can use just their phone to do all that stuff. Maybe if you're into things like vlogging, or maybe you're a Twitch streamer or something like that, or you're a photographer, then obviously digital cameras still have a very viable place in your day to day life, but for the rest of us not as much. But that's just a quick rundown on the early history of digital cameras. There's obviously a lot more to it than that. I could do a full episode just about the still video camera technology and how it played a part in journalism at the end of the nineteen eighties. And again, some of y'all out there might have a few digital cameras that you use, particularly if you do any vlogging or Twitch streaming or anything like that. But I just wanted to kind of look back and reflect, as it were. If it's a DSLR, you're literally reflecting. But yeah, I wanted to think back on the history of these cameras and to really get a decent understanding of the two major technologies that dominate the space. But that's it for this episode. I hope you are all well, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts. And how the tech are you? So? These days, just about everyone has a digital camera on them pretty much all the time, right, because smartphones have become all things to all people, digital camera, phone, computer, media player, video game device, et cetera. And you know, of course, there are folks out there who still use standalone digital cameras. They're photographers, they're vloggers, their cinematographers, tons of other folks. But it's interesting to me because young people don't know a world that didn't have digital cameras. For those of us of a certain age, we can remember a time when digital cameras were really rare or not even a thing at all. We remember using film cameras. Right. You would take a photo and you would have no idea how it came out until after you developed that film somewhere, and that could be weeks or months or even longer later. If you're like me, you might misplace that canister of film. It might be years before you see that picture, and then you'd say, oh, it was out of focus. Now, like all inventions, it can actually be tricky to figure out where to start. When we're talking about digital cameras, which is what we're really focusing on today. I wanted to think about where did we come from with digital cameras, and I figure one good place to start for digital cameras is eighteen thirty nine. And yeah, that's pretty early. You're not going to find a Fujifilm or a Canon or a Nikon camera in eighteen thirty nine. In fact, you know when you figure that the history of film traces itself back to around eighteen sixteen, eighteen thirty nine is a pretty early date for digital cameras. Really, what I want to talk about is discovery that is key to digital cameras. The actual photography part will come along much later. But it was in eighteen thirty nine when a teenage smarty pants named Edmund Beckerel created a peculiar device. He took an acidic solution and he added silver chloride to it, and then he connected electrodes that were made of platinum to this mixture, and he exposed the whole thing to light, and he observed that when light hit the solution there was a change in voltage, an electrical current would flow through the electrodes. He had discovered the photovoltaic effect, which is the effect of certain materials that change light energy into electrical energy, the same thing that's the basis for stuff like solar panels. Right now, we're going to jump ahead more than a century, but that discovery would be key for digital cameras. And we can give a quick nod to folks at Bell Laboratories in nineteen forty seven who use semiconductors to invent the point contact transistor. Semiconductors that will remind you are materials that under certain circumstances act as a conductor of electricity and other circumstances act as an insulator. Well, we're going to actually move all the way up to the nineteen sixties and the golden age of the space race. So one of the many brilliant people working on behalf of the United States during the space Race was Eugene F. Lali. He had been interested in photography ever since his childhood. He even developed pund non intended, a method to reduce red eye in color photos, when he was a teenager using a Strobe light After he graduated college with a degree in electrical engineering, he got a job working in the aerospace industry and his focus, which again pund non intended, was on interplanetary space exploration. He worked on proposals for spacecraft design. He proposed features that would make it possible for humans to journey to other planets or moons and such. Now, one of the many challenges of space travel is navigation. There are lots of challenge with space travel, for example, keeping space from killing you, but navigation is definitely one of them, and just knowing where you are in relation to everything else can be a bit of a challenge. There aren't many landmarks out in space, and the road signage is absolutely terrible. So Llli proposed a system that would analyze light from celestial bodies to determine where spacecraft was relative to everything else, essentially saying, oh, I recognize this configuration and based upon the positioning that means you have to be here. You can think of it almost like a star map. And he put together a scientific paper on the subject, and he titled it Mosaic Guidance for Interplanetary Travel, and he presented his work at the nineteen sixty one convention of the American Rocket Society. Now, Lali's proposal was to create a special kind of ship, a mosaic of photo detectors or photodiodes or photo sites, you can think of it as any of those terms. So these would collect light, they would then convert that light to an electrical current, and then a computer system would analyze the current coming from all these different photo detectors to make sense of it all. And essentially Lolly was describing a type of photosensor that you would find in digital cameras. Now, his idea was ahead of its time. It was solid as far as the concept goes, but it would take several years before anyone was ready to try and make something similar to what he described in his paper. But it was absolutely on point. In fact, it would take a little more than a decade before someone else built upon Lolly's idea as far as digital cameras are concerned. An engineer with Texas Instruments named Willis Adcock filed a patent in nineteen seventy two for a filmless camera, or, as the patent called it, an quote electronic photography system end quote. Now. Adcock's patent described the invention as again quote, a completely electronic system for recording and subsequently displaying still life pictures include an optical electronic transducer for generating electronic signals responsive to an optical image. Now, in case you're not familiar with the term transducer, this refers to any sort of device that converts one form of energy to a different form of energy, So in this case, the device would convert light energy into electrical energy. Now, keep in mind the nineteen seventy two pre dates the era of personal computers, so Adcock's description of his invention references television sets as the display system for his invention. He explains in the patent that the electronic photographic device would sidestep the need for film, which also means there's no need to develop whatever medium you're using to capture the image. In this case, you know it's electrical currents, not a physical film. Adcock puts forward that this would mean his invention would be less expensive and more efficient than film cameras, which is hard to argue. Right though, it is a bit odd to think of just using your television set to view your photos. So Adcock's version also didn't make it to the consumer market. But folks around this time started to experiment with early test designs for digital cameras, and one such person was Steve Sassin. He had joined Eastman Kodak as an engineer in nineteen seventy three and put together a prototype digital camera. So the sensor he used fell into the category of CCD, which stands for charge coupled device. These were first invented back in nineteen sixty nine, and it's the CCD's job to capture light, to convert that light to an electrical charge, and to send that as data to the camera's processor. But it actually has to go through a few more steps. Has to go through an analog to digital converter first, because electrical charge is an analog signal, right, It's continuous, it's not made up of binary steps. So you have to convert that analog signal to a digital one in order to process it with a computer processor. It does get way more complicated than why I just described, but you get the general idea. Now. The way CCD works is that the charge created by the chip depends entirely on the intensity of light that's hitting a specific part of the CCD. So the order of operations is that when you push the button on a camera in order to take an image, a shutter opens up for a moment. Now, the shutter otherwise blocks light coming in from the optics of the camera the lenses that are designed to focus light so that it hits the CCD when the shutter is open, So light comes in, it's focused by the lenses, it's passed through the gap created by the shutter opening. This is also known as the aperture. By the way, you can actually set the aperture to different values in order to allow more or less light through. So the aperture, along with the shutter speed, will adjust the exposure of your image and then the light will hit the CCD. So a CCD, if you were to get a microscope out and take a look at it, it would look like a little grid of squares, and each square in that grid is a photovoltaic component that can transform light energy into an electrical current. It is a photo site or photodiode. One thing I didn't know about CCDs before this episode is how they are wired, or rather how they aren't wired in a way. So you might think, as I did, that each individual square is wired to transfer the electrical current it generates to a processor, you know, through a pathway. But that's not the case. And the reason for that is because if you did do it that way, you would potentially ruin the image you were trying to take. And this is because of leakage, that is electrical leakage. So the densely packed tiny wires would leak electrical charge and your finalized image would have flaws in it, like streaks or striations. Now I wasn't familiar with that issue, so big thanks to an eleven year old YouTube video from engineer Guy for pointing it out. Now, interestingly, this does contrast it with a different kind of image sensor, which actually predates the CCD, But we'll get to that. So if you're not wiring these individual squares so that they each go to a processor, how does this work? How can a CCD transfer charge so that it can be processed well? As engineer Guy explains, a CCD is made of silicon, and in the manufacturing process, engineers add insulating sections to divide up the silicon into rows. So you have these dividing lines that separate each row from one another, and because it's insulated, the charge cannot pass across this gap. Now, to create columns, engineers would add strips of metal, typically aluminum, so each square is insulated from its neighbors in channel stops. That's what's called And when light hits this array of squares or photo sites, each of these squares builds up an electrical charge relative to the intensity of light that hit it. So if one square was hit with more intense light, it's going to have a different charge than that one that just got a tiny bit of light. But collectively, all of these squares capture an image in the form of an electrical charge at this point. But to transfer that charge and turn it into data, the CCD shifts the image across the strips of alumnum or whatever other metal might have been used. So it's kind of like the image is moving row by row across the CCD To transfer to the camera's memory. You get a row of charges that gets transferred through an analog to digital converter and goes to the processor, and the next row moves in, so it's like bottom row is gone, next row comes down. Sort of thing, not necessarily bottom, but you get the idea. But it reminds me of how in the bad old days of dial up internet, you would go to a web page and if it had images on it, you would watch as the image would load one row of pixels at a time. It's kind of like that, except in this case we're talking about shifting charges off a grid of photosites and into memory one row at a time. Also, the electrical signal again passes through an amplifier, so it's an analog. It goes through an amplifier than an analog to digital converter, and this is in order to have a signal strong enough to be able to actually scan. Now, remember a pixel is a point of light, so each of these photosites is corresponding to a pixel in the image. So a digital image consists of lots of these little points of light, and collectively they represent the overall picture. The more densely packed you have pixels of light, and the more pixels that are there, generally speaking, the smoother the picture is. If you have fewer pixels, it's going to be a clunky picture. And I always describe this as imagine you've got a collection of wooden blocks and they're of different colors, and you're instructed to make an image of a let's say it's a flower using these wooden blocks. And let's say that the woodenlo are you know, an inch to a side, and you've got you know, enough to be able to make a picture, well an inch to a side, it's probably going to be a pretty clunky looking flower, unless you're building so that you're taking an image from like twenty stories up or something. So then let's say that you were given blocks that were half an inch to a side, and you've got more blocks now to build an image of a flower. Well, that flower is probably going to look a little less blocky than the first one, let's say a quarter inch to a side, and so on and so on. As the pixels get smaller and you're able to pack them more densely together, the resulting image you get is of a higher resolution. In order to make that happen, these CCDs have to have a grid of photo sites that are corresponding to all those pixels, so keep that in mind. By the way, the CCD, like I said, is not the only type of sensor for digital photography. The other major type is called a complementary metal oxide semiconduct And in this context, complementary doesn't mean the sensor says, hey, you're looking sharp. Let's take a photo. The initialism for this phrase is ce moss CMOS, and when we come back we'll talk more about how a sea moss works and how it is fundamentally different from CCD. We'll also mention again that SEAMS predates CCD. But before we get into all that, let's take a quick break to think our sponsors. Okay, we're back and we're going to talk about ce MOS. So, like a CCD, a SEAMS sensor converts you know, photons of light into an electrical charge, But unlike a CCD, each photodiode or pixel in a sea moss sensor has its own amplifier, so these are individually wired, whereas CCDs aren't. So rather than scanning the charge just one row at a time, a SEAMAS sensor sends an amplified signal from each photo site to an analog to digital converter. Now this means that SEMAS sensors create more noise than CCD sensors visual noise right, That means you can get some artifacts due to electrical leakage. Even so, SEMAS sensors are really prominent in embedded vision applications in fact, they've overtaken CCDs. Now. One reason for that is that SEMAS sensors draw less power than CCDs, so you can extend battery life for example, which is you know, that's a big deal, or you can make it a smaller battery. Either way, right, you can either say, well, i can use a smaller battery because I'm not drawing as much power, so I can have just as much charge, but I can reduce the weight of the overall unit. If we're talking about a headset, that's a big deal, right if you're going to be wearing that for hours. Or conversely, you could say, well, we're going to keep the battery the same size, but now we'll be able to power the device longer than we could if we were to use a CCD sensor. SEMAS sensors are also far less expensive than CCDs, so that make them makes them a really attractive option when you're trying to keep product prices under control, unless you're Apple, in which case you just crank that number up as high or even higher than the market will allow. Anyway, for the early days of digital cameras, CCDs were really where it was at. It would take years of work to mitigate the issues with noise reduction in seams technology for those sensors to really catch up and then take the lead. So a lot of the rest of this episode is really going to be about devices that used CCD sensors. Just know that eventually Sea Moss took their place. Now back to Sassin, right if you forgot. He's the guy I talked about before the break. He's the one who built an early prototype digital camera. So his boss, Gareth Lloyd, had suspected that the charge coupled device or CCD might make a practical use in photography, so he gave Sassin a dream assignment. He said, you know, see what you can do with this thing. See if you can make something out of it. Because Sassin had a background in electrical engineering, and while he was working for Kodak, people were worried that he would get into trouble because he was apparently very curious kind of guy, as in curious as in how does this work? Not man? That guy is weird. So Sassin has said that hardly anyone knew about his project, but it wasn't because it was some sort of top secret project. Instead, it was seen in such a small operation that no one really knew it was going on, just you know. Was also not a straight path from assignment to complete a project. He said it was a lot of learning and a lot of mistakes along the way, and that often he questioned the wisdom of agreeing to do the project in the first place. But in December nineteen seventy five he had himself a prototype and his camera was a bit of a Frankenstein's monster, so he had salvaged a lens from a Super eight film camera. The circuitry mixed analog and digital elements, or he had to include an analog digital converter in this as well. The CCD array was also part of this. Obviously, there was more than a dozen nickel cadmium batteries to power the thing, and it weighed nearly nine pounds, pretty hefty for a digital camera. You would not want to carry one of those around on casual outings. It had no mechanical shutter. Assassin did incorporate an electronic shutter with a shutter speed of one twentieth of a second, and he discovered that the CCD was sensitive to infrared light and that this would sometimes cause issues when he was taking images indoors, so he also added an infrared filter to block IR out. As for memory, while he decided to go straight to storage, he used a tape assembly as in magnetic tape, so it worked on a principle similar to audio cassettes or VHS tapes or cam quarters old tape based camquarders. There are pictures of this prototype online. You should check it out if you are curious, because it really does look like of Frankenstein's monster. It is an odd collection of parts. The digital camera could capture images at a resolution of one hundred pixels by one hundred pixels, so in my example of using wooden blocks, it would be as if you had, you know, ten thousand blocks in order to make a picture, and it could be one hundred blocks per side. So yeah, the full image would be approximately ten thousand pixels. Much later we would talk about digital camera resolution in terms of megapixels or millions of pixels. So ten thousand pixels is a far cry from what we would see with consumer digital cameras or the kind that's even in your phone. But you know, it was a start, and we'll get back to megapixels. As it turns out when you hear a camera has a fifteen megapixel sensor in it or whatever. That doesn't necessarily mean that all those pixels are going to end up in the final image. But we'll get back to that. So Sassin showed off his work to his colleagues over at Kodak, and he took photos with this very weird camera and then he popped the tape out of the camera and inserted it into a playback device that was connected to a television, so again similar to something like a VCR. He showed how the images would display on the TV screen and his peers they thought it was interesting, but they didn't really see a practical application. I mean, who the heck would want to look at their photos on their television? To them, it seemed impractical and unrealistic. Keep in mind, this is still really before personal computers had taken off, so Assassin's work was largely dismissed. It's also worth pointing out that Kodak was very much in the film business, so not only did film seem to be the winning strategy at the time, it was the crux of their entire enterprise. The company had an incentive to dismiss digital photography because digital photography doesn't need film or processing or development. You don't need any of that. It's all the stuff that was the foundation of Kodak's business. So you could argue that Kodak partly ignored digital photography because it it was really inconvenient to its established business strategy. I've heard similar arguments made against certain car companies and their slow move to develop fully electric vehicles that because that was inconvenient to their business strategy, they purposefully ignored it and then got left behind. Anyway, while Sassin's invention was neat, it was really ahead of its time. I mean, in nineteen seventy five, we're just getting into the very earliest days of personal computers, for goodness sakes, and at that time really only nerdy hobbyists were into PCs. While Kodak arguably made a big old whoopsie by not pursuing digital photography earlier, you can hardly blame the company for not embracing a tech that just didn't really have a place in the industry just yet. Sassin would still work on R and D with digital cameras, as did other engineers around the world. One problem that needed solving was how to capture color because the CCD could convert light to electrical current, but there was no information about color in that signal, so you would end up with a black and white photograph. To get color, you would need to add a filter of some sort and then program a processor to interpret the charges coming through in order to add color to the final image. So typically you would do this with a mosaic of filters, and you would have rows that often would alternate red and green squares at the top row, and then the next row would be blue and green squares, and then back to red and green and so on, and so you would just have this grid of little squares alternating between these colors, and each filter would block light of its corresponding color from passing through, so only light from other colors would make it through that filter. So a blue filter blocks blue light and a green filter blocks green light, et cetera. Now this affects the intensity of the light that actually reaches the CCD, and thus it affects the electrical charge. As I said, you have to program the processor to do this, but the processor can interpret these values and apply that rotation to determine the color that each pixel should show. This also involves some error correction. The processor determines each pixel's color in part by comparing it to neighboring pixels, which sounds weird, right, Like you're saying, what color is pixel twelve? Well, let's look at pixels eleven and thirteen, and let's also look above and below this pixel, and all of that together will help us determine what color it should be. But you got to think, well, you have to do this to all the pixels all the same time, right, It's not like you just magically have determined one pixels color. So very interesting stuff. But let's skip ahead to the nineteen eighties now. As I said, numerous engineers worked on advancing digital camera technology, though at this point there really weren't any digital cameras on the market. A few sectors were making use of early digital cameras, but this was like stuff like in you know, high tech military applications and sometimes medical or scientific applications, but it would take a lot more time to become a practical consumer electronic device. Now up in the Great White North. That's an affectionate term for Canada, in case you're not familiar with that phrase. The University of Calgary's science team designed a digital camera to take pictures of the sky to catch the northern lights you know, auroras. In other words, they used CCDs similar to what Sassin had used, the old one hundred by one hundred pixel kind, and their design was all digital. They didn't have analog circuits like Sassin's design did, although they still had to you know, convert stuff, because electrical current is still an analog signal. Ultimately, well, in the mid nineteen eighties, the Japanese company Nikon created the first digital single lens reflex camera or DSLR camera. However, this prototype, called the Nikon SVC, which stood for still video Camera, wasn't entirely digital. It used an analog format for media storage. Still, Nikon's work would lead to an incredibly popular form factor a few years down the road. And you might owe, my Drew Giz wonder what a digital single lens reflex camera even means. Now you've definitely seen them, you might own one, you might use one all the time, But what makes a DSLR camera? Well, to answer that, it's good to first just focus on the SLR part, because those cameras predated the digital kind. We had film based ones, so a single lens reflex camera uses a peculiar arrangement of mirrors so that the photographer can see through the viewfinder and they're looking exactly at what they're about to capture when they snap a photo. I'll see if I can explain it here. It is tricky without visual aids. But light comes inside the camera through the lens right, so the lens focuses light into the camera. Now, normally it would just aim this light back toward the aperture, but in front of the aperture is a mirror that's angled, so it reflects light upward into the camera toward the viewfinder. Now, the light doesn't go straight to the viewfinder. Instead, the light hits what's called a penta mirror, and as the name implies, pina mirror, it is a five sided mirror. This mirror bounces the light around so that it can aim correctly for the viewfinder as well as you know, not be all upside down and reversed and everything. This allows the photographer to see the scene as it is seen through the lens, and that means that they have a clear idea of what they're about to capture. Now, this is in contrast to other kinds of cameras which might use a separate set of optics just for the viewfinder, which means the photographer is seeing the image through a different optical path than what is going to hit the film, so you can you can have some discrepancies there, But with this approach, the SLR approach, you're looking at the exact same light that is ultimately going to hit your medium, whether it's film or a CCD or SEMAS. So snapping a photo means that the first reflecting mirror, the one that it captures the light from the lens and knocks it up to the penta mirror. That mirror actually moves out of the way as the shutter opens, and that lets light pass beyond the mirror, go past the shutter, go through the aperture, and then hit the exposed medium at the end of the sequence. You know, at the end of this moment, the mirror moves back in place and the shutter closes of the film advances. So for just a second, when you do snap that picture, you no longer have a visual pathway through that optical lens through the viewfinder, so your view is shut off for a moment. With digital SLRs, like I said, the whole process is the same. It's just instead of film, you're exposing a CCD or C moss to light. But the basic concept is otherwise identical. A series of mirrors provides the photographer a view of what they're about to capture, and it's pretty darn neat all, right. But we also had the phrase still video camera, right, that was what Nikon was using an SVC, So what the heck is that? Well, in the nineteen eighties, one line of research that pre dates the consumer digital camera was to capture still images as if they were a single frame of video. So each still photo would be a single frame in a video as if you were shooting video itself. Those frames could be stored on magnetic tape, similar to vhs. These were not digital cameras because they stored information in analog format, and they didn't become popular consumer products either. It was more like a developmental step toward digital cameras. They bridged a gap between purely analog and purely digital and film and digital. They had some limited use in the late eighties and early nineties, primarily in things like journalism, so they were being used in various industries. They just weren't making their way to the consumer market now. According to CNET, what should have been the first handheld digital camera was the Fuji DS one P, which was produced in nineteen eighty eight, and it would store images in digital file formats and save to a memory car holding sixteen whole megabytes of storage space. But this camera never graduated into becoming an actual product. Instead, the first digital camera sold in the US as a consumer product was the Diecam Model one, also known as the Logitech Photo Man in nineteen ninety. We'll talk more about this early digital camera after we take a quick break to thank our sponsors. So we're back and we're talking about the Diecam Model one, the first digital camera sold in the United States. Keep in mind there are other cameras that were sold in other parts of the world, but I'm based in the US, so there's the bias, and I'm guessing there wasn't a ton of confidence behind this new technology. According to the Digital Camera Museum, the Diecam Model one shipped in quote unquote plane boxes and that they typically have very small serial numbers. Like their serial numbers are four days, digits and lengths, which indicates a pretty small number of them were ever manufactured. Right, If you think that limits you up to zero zero zero zero to nine nine ninety nine, well that's ten thousand units. That's not very many, and that's if you use every single variation of the four digits for that serial number. The manufacturer suggested retail price for the Diecam Model one was a hefty nine hundred and ninety five dollars. Now keep in mind this is nineteen ninety, so we have to adjust for inflation. If we do that, then that means the Diecam Model one would cost around twenty four hundred dollars today. Not unheard of for digital cameras. I mean, there are some out there that are much more expensive, but yeah, pretty hefty price tag. This camera had a massive whole single megabyte of storage space. That's me being a little cheeky there. As for image resolution, it was just three hundred and seventy two by two hundred forty pixels, which if you multiply those together that means total you get eighty nine two hundred eighty pixels. So still nowhere closed to the megapixel range. Now, this is a good time to talk about stuff like resolution and megapixels. As I mentioned, earlier. Just because the device might be marketed as having a certain number of megapixels doesn't mean that every single pixel is actually used in the final image that you capture. Some of those pixels might be used for things like error correction and image stabilization in the processing phase, so it leaves you with fewer pixels to make up the actual image itself. So, for example, according to Canon's website, the Canon PowerShot V ten is marketed as a twenty point nine megapixel sensor camera. However, if you're shooting video, you actually end up with a thirteen point one megapixel resolution video, and if you're shooting still images, then those images are going to have fifteen point two megapixels. So while the camera has twenty point nine megapixels on the sensor, none of those megapixels are actually making it to the final images. I don't think it's really as big a deal these days, but once upon a time, megapixels was kind of shorthand for digital camera quality, which was a bit misleading, and generally speaking, people thought, Okay, a bigger number is better, right, that just makes it easy. So that meant if you were looking in the store and you had two different digital camera boxes in front of you, and one of them says it's a ten megapixel digital camera, and the other one says it's a twelve megapixel camera. Well, clearly the twelve megapixel has to be superior. Except it's not as simple as that, because the megapixel thing really does just describe resolution, and it's true that lower resolution images are more blocky and not as smooth as higher resolution pictures, So it does matter. Resolution does matter, But once you get beyond a certain point, then you're not really likely to notice a change in resolution unless you're taking an image and then you're zooming into extreme levels, like you're doing a massive digital zoom into the image, or if you're taking that digital image and then you want to print it out and you're going to blow it up into like a banner or something, then you're going to be able to notice a real difference in resolution. But beyond that, you're probably not going to be able to tell the difference between two different high resolution cameras. Other features like color representation and contrast, which is the difference between the brightest colors and the darkest colors, these things can make a huge difference in image quality, so it's not just resolution, and it's quite possible for a camera that has a sensor with fewer photo sits on it to still produce better images than one that has a metric buttload of photo sits on its sensor. Anyway, in parallel with the development of digital cameras came file formats like JPEGs, and also you got photo editing software like Photoshop or digital Darkroom, and so everything was kind of converging toward digital cameras becoming a viable consumer product in the early nineteen nineties, although most of them were still wicked expensive, so a lot of folks like yours truly stuck with film cameras for several more years. In nineteen ninety four, Apple even got into the act. Apple released a digital camera. You might not have known that that Apple had a digital camera. Once upon a time, you could buy an Apple branded digital camera and it wasn't part of a phone. It was called the Apple Quick Take one hundred at least the original was, and it boasted a resolution of six hundred and forty by four hundred eighty pixels. Now I did say Apple branded. I did not say Apple built, because, as it turns out, the Apple Quick Take one hundred was actually made by Kodak, the company that had kind of slept on digital photography. The two hundred, the Apple Quick Take two hundred would actually be made by Fujifilm. So this was kind of in a dark time for Apple. The company would be in a rather slow decline until Steve Jobs would return to the company in nineteen ninety seven and really shake things up again. And it would actually take a few years for Apple to find its footing. So you'd be forgiven if you didn't know that Apple released a digital camera back at this time, because the company was seen as something of a joke in the industry. Scenet's Richard Trenholm documents that in nineteen ninety four, Olympus produced a camera called the Deltis VC eleven hundred, which you could connect to a modem so you could actually send digital photos online. That's pretty early for ninety four. I mean, it's amazing, as Trenholm rits, quote, it took about six minutes to transmit an image end quote Yahalza, and we're still talking about relatively low resolution images here, because the camera had a max resolution of seven hundred and sixty eight by five hundred and seventy six pixels. As the nineteen nineties went on, digital cameras would creep further into the consumer marketplace, though for a lot of us, film was still the way to go because digital cameras were still pretty expensive. I would argue that the real seed change would be when cameras found their way into cellular phones, which happened at the close of the decade. So there were cheaper digital cameras that would come out over the nineteen nineties. I mean I even finally bought one late in the nineties, but they were pretty primitive. They were like point and shoot cameras. You could get professional grade digital cameras, but they were much more expensive and very few people were purchasing them. There were very few reasons to do it. Like we're still talking at an era where it's before social media, and only a few websites were starting to offer things like digital storage for photographs, So where were you going to display your digital images? A lot of people didn't really jump on the bandwagon because there really weren't ways to easily not just take digital photos, but experience them. So things would start to change in the late nineties and nineteen ninety nine, the Kyo Serrah Visual Phone VP two ten came out in Japan. It had a front facing camera and it was people taking images at one hundred and ten thousand pixels and it could hold up to twenty JPEG images. The phone itself was in the candy bar style, complete with physical keys, because this is way before touchscreen phones would become the norm, and you could send the photos via email over Japan's mobile phone network system. It was exclusive to Japan. As far as I can tell, it retailed for around three hundred and twenty five dollars in nineteen ninety nine. If we adjust for inflation, that's like six hundred and ten bucks for today. Not bad, I mean smartphones are much more expensive today. But obviously it would take some time for handset manufacturers to start including digital camera sensors and lenses in mobile phones as kind of a standard option. But really the dye had been cast, and as we edged toward the era of the consumer smartphone and the debut of the Apple iPhone, the writing would be on the wall for digital cameras. Like again, they haven't disappeared and you can still find them, but the smartphone would mean that fewer people would really invest in getting a digital camera, just as fewer people invest in a standard mobile media player, because our phones can do all of that. Right. We can largely thank Apple for this, because the iPhone really did usher in that age, and honestly, I think it's pretty cool. I still think that, you know, digital cameras are awesome, and standalone ones are amazing. It's just that I think most people don't need one. They can use just their phone to do all that stuff. Maybe if you're into things like vlogging, or maybe you're a Twitch streamer or something like that, or you're a photographer, then obviously digital cameras still have a very viable place in your day to day life, but for the rest of us not as much. But that's just a quick rundown on the early history of digital cameras. There's obviously a lot more to it than that. I could do a full episode just about the still video camera technology and how it played a part in journalism at the end of the nineteen eighties. And again, some of y'all out there might have a few digital cameras that you use, particularly if you do any vlogging or Twitch streaming or anything like that. But I just wanted to kind of look back and reflect, as it were. If it's a DSLR, you're literally reflecting. But yeah, I wanted to think back on the history of these cameras and to really get a decent understanding of the two major technologies that dominate the space. But that's it for this episode. I hope you are all well, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.