Speaker 1: Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there,
Speaker 1: and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland.
Speaker 1: I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts. And how the
Speaker 1: tech are you? So? These days, just about everyone has
Speaker 1: a digital camera on them pretty much all the time, right,
Speaker 1: because smartphones have become all things to all people, digital camera, phone, computer,
Speaker 1: media player, video game device, et cetera. And you know,
Speaker 1: of course, there are folks out there who still use
Speaker 1: standalone digital cameras. They're photographers, they're vloggers, their cinematographers, tons
Speaker 1: of other folks. But it's interesting to me because young
Speaker 1: people don't know a world that didn't have digital cameras.
Speaker 1: For those of us of a certain age, we can
Speaker 1: remember a time when digital cameras were really rare or
Speaker 1: not even a thing at all. We remember using film cameras. Right.
Speaker 1: You would take a photo and you would have no
Speaker 1: idea how it came out until after you developed that
Speaker 1: film somewhere, and that could be weeks or months or
Speaker 1: even longer later. If you're like me, you might misplace
Speaker 1: that canister of film. It might be years before you
Speaker 1: see that picture, and then you'd say, oh, it was
Speaker 1: out of focus. Now, like all inventions, it can actually
Speaker 1: be tricky to figure out where to start. When we're
Speaker 1: talking about digital cameras, which is what we're really focusing
Speaker 1: on today. I wanted to think about where did we
Speaker 1: come from with digital cameras, and I figure one good
Speaker 1: place to start for digital cameras is eighteen thirty nine.
Speaker 1: And yeah, that's pretty early. You're not going to find
Speaker 1: a Fujifilm or a Canon or a Nikon camera in
Speaker 1: eighteen thirty nine. In fact, you know when you figure
Speaker 1: that the history of film traces itself back to around
Speaker 1: eighteen sixteen, eighteen thirty nine is a pretty early date
Speaker 1: for digital cameras. Really, what I want to talk about
Speaker 1: is discovery that is key to digital cameras. The actual
Speaker 1: photography part will come along much later. But it was
Speaker 1: in eighteen thirty nine when a teenage smarty pants named
Speaker 1: Edmund Beckerel created a peculiar device. He took an acidic
Speaker 1: solution and he added silver chloride to it, and then
Speaker 1: he connected electrodes that were made of platinum to this mixture,
Speaker 1: and he exposed the whole thing to light, and he
Speaker 1: observed that when light hit the solution there was a
Speaker 1: change in voltage, an electrical current would flow through the electrodes.
Speaker 1: He had discovered the photovoltaic effect, which is the effect
Speaker 1: of certain materials that change light energy into electrical energy,
Speaker 1: the same thing that's the basis for stuff like solar panels.
Speaker 1: Right now, we're going to jump ahead more than a century,
Speaker 1: but that discovery would be key for digital cameras. And
Speaker 1: we can give a quick nod to folks at Bell
Speaker 1: Laboratories in nineteen forty seven who use semiconductors to invent
Speaker 1: the point contact transistor. Semiconductors that will remind you are
Speaker 1: materials that under certain circumstances act as a conductor of
Speaker 1: electricity and other circumstances act as an insulator. Well, we're
Speaker 1: going to actually move all the way up to the
Speaker 1: nineteen sixties and the golden age of the space race.
Speaker 1: So one of the many brilliant people working on behalf
Speaker 1: of the United States during the space Race was Eugene F. Lali.
Speaker 1: He had been interested in photography ever since his childhood.
Speaker 1: He even developed pund non intended, a method to reduce
Speaker 1: red eye in color photos, when he was a teenager
Speaker 1: using a Strobe light After he graduated college with a
Speaker 1: degree in electrical engineering, he got a job working in
Speaker 1: the aerospace industry and his focus, which again pund non intended,
Speaker 1: was on interplanetary space exploration. He worked on proposals for
Speaker 1: spacecraft design. He proposed features that would make it possible
Speaker 1: for humans to journey to other planets or moons and such. Now,
Speaker 1: one of the many challenges of space travel is navigation.
Speaker 1: There are lots of challenge with space travel, for example,
Speaker 1: keeping space from killing you, but navigation is definitely one
Speaker 1: of them, and just knowing where you are in relation
Speaker 1: to everything else can be a bit of a challenge.
Speaker 1: There aren't many landmarks out in space, and the road
Speaker 1: signage is absolutely terrible. So Llli proposed a system that
Speaker 1: would analyze light from celestial bodies to determine where spacecraft
Speaker 1: was relative to everything else, essentially saying, oh, I recognize
Speaker 1: this configuration and based upon the positioning that means you
Speaker 1: have to be here. You can think of it almost
Speaker 1: like a star map. And he put together a scientific
Speaker 1: paper on the subject, and he titled it Mosaic Guidance
Speaker 1: for Interplanetary Travel, and he presented his work at the
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty one convention of the American Rocket Society. Now,
Speaker 1: Lali's proposal was to create a special kind of ship,
Speaker 1: a mosaic of photo detectors or photodiodes or photo sites,
Speaker 1: you can think of it as any of those terms.
Speaker 1: So these would collect light, they would then convert that
Speaker 1: light to an electrical current, and then a computer system
Speaker 1: would analyze the current coming from all these different photo
Speaker 1: detectors to make sense of it all. And essentially Lolly
Speaker 1: was describing a type of photosensor that you would find
Speaker 1: in digital cameras. Now, his idea was ahead of its time.
Speaker 1: It was solid as far as the concept goes, but
Speaker 1: it would take several years before anyone was ready to
Speaker 1: try and make something similar to what he described in
Speaker 1: his paper. But it was absolutely on point. In fact,
Speaker 1: it would take a little more than a decade before
Speaker 1: someone else built upon Lolly's idea as far as digital
Speaker 1: cameras are concerned. An engineer with Texas Instruments named Willis
Speaker 1: Adcock filed a patent in nineteen seventy two for a
Speaker 1: filmless camera, or, as the patent called it, an quote
Speaker 1: electronic photography system end quote. Now. Adcock's patent described the
Speaker 1: invention as again quote, a completely electronic system for recording
Speaker 1: and subsequently displaying still life pictures include an optical electronic
Speaker 1: transducer for generating electronic signals responsive to an optical image. Now,
Speaker 1: in case you're not familiar with the term transducer, this
Speaker 1: refers to any sort of device that converts one form
Speaker 1: of energy to a different form of energy, So in
Speaker 1: this case, the device would convert light energy into electrical energy. Now,
Speaker 1: keep in mind the nineteen seventy two pre dates the
Speaker 1: era of personal computers, so Adcock's description of his invention
Speaker 1: references television sets as the display system for his invention.
Speaker 1: He explains in the patent that the electronic photographic device
Speaker 1: would sidestep the need for film, which also means there's
Speaker 1: no need to develop whatever medium you're using to capture
Speaker 1: the image. In this case, you know it's electrical currents,
Speaker 1: not a physical film. Adcock puts forward that this would
Speaker 1: mean his invention would be less expensive and more efficient
Speaker 1: than film cameras, which is hard to argue. Right though,
Speaker 1: it is a bit odd to think of just using
Speaker 1: your television set to view your photos. So Adcock's version
Speaker 1: also didn't make it to the consumer market. But folks
Speaker 1: around this time started to experiment with early test designs
Speaker 1: for digital cameras, and one such person was Steve Sassin.
Speaker 1: He had joined Eastman Kodak as an engineer in nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy three and put together a prototype digital camera. So
Speaker 1: the sensor he used fell into the category of CCD,
Speaker 1: which stands for charge coupled device. These were first invented
Speaker 1: back in nineteen sixty nine, and it's the CCD's job
Speaker 1: to capture light, to convert that light to an electrical charge,
Speaker 1: and to send that as data to the camera's processor.
Speaker 1: But it actually has to go through a few more steps.
Speaker 1: Has to go through an analog to digital converter first,
Speaker 1: because electrical charge is an analog signal, right, It's continuous,
Speaker 1: it's not made up of binary steps. So you have
Speaker 1: to convert that analog signal to a digital one in
Speaker 1: order to process it with a computer processor. It does
Speaker 1: get way more complicated than why I just described, but
Speaker 1: you get the general idea. Now. The way CCD works
Speaker 1: is that the charge created by the chip depends entirely
Speaker 1: on the intensity of light that's hitting a specific part
Speaker 1: of the CCD. So the order of operations is that
Speaker 1: when you push the button on a camera in order
Speaker 1: to take an image, a shutter opens up for a moment. Now,
Speaker 1: the shutter otherwise blocks light coming in from the optics
Speaker 1: of the camera the lenses that are designed to focus
Speaker 1: light so that it hits the CCD when the shutter
Speaker 1: is open, So light comes in, it's focused by the lenses,
Speaker 1: it's passed through the gap created by the shutter opening.
Speaker 1: This is also known as the aperture. By the way,
Speaker 1: you can actually set the aperture to different values in
Speaker 1: order to allow more or less light through. So the aperture,
Speaker 1: along with the shutter speed, will adjust the exposure of
Speaker 1: your image and then the light will hit the CCD.
Speaker 1: So a CCD, if you were to get a microscope
Speaker 1: out and take a look at it, it would look like
Speaker 1: a little grid of squares, and each square in that
Speaker 1: grid is a photovoltaic component that can transform light energy
Speaker 1: into an electrical current. It is a photo site or photodiode.
Speaker 1: One thing I didn't know about CCDs before this episode
Speaker 1: is how they are wired, or rather how they aren't
Speaker 1: wired in a way. So you might think, as I did,
Speaker 1: that each individual square is wired to transfer the electrical
Speaker 1: current it generates to a processor, you know, through a pathway.
Speaker 1: But that's not the case. And the reason for that
Speaker 1: is because if you did do it that way, you
Speaker 1: would potentially ruin the image you were trying to take.
Speaker 1: And this is because of leakage, that is electrical leakage.
Speaker 1: So the densely packed tiny wires would leak electrical charge
Speaker 1: and your finalized image would have flaws in it, like
Speaker 1: streaks or striations. Now I wasn't familiar with that issue,
Speaker 1: so big thanks to an eleven year old YouTube video
Speaker 1: from engineer Guy for pointing it out. Now, interestingly, this
Speaker 1: does contrast it with a different kind of image sensor,
Speaker 1: which actually predates the CCD, But we'll get to that.
Speaker 1: So if you're not wiring these individual squares so that
Speaker 1: they each go to a processor, how does this work?
Speaker 1: How can a CCD transfer charge so that it can
Speaker 1: be processed well? As engineer Guy explains, a CCD is
Speaker 1: made of silicon, and in the manufacturing process, engineers add
Speaker 1: insulating sections to divide up the silicon into rows. So
Speaker 1: you have these dividing lines that separate each row from
Speaker 1: one another, and because it's insulated, the charge cannot pass
Speaker 1: across this gap. Now, to create columns, engineers would add
Speaker 1: strips of metal, typically aluminum, so each square is insulated
Speaker 1: from its neighbors in channel stops. That's what's called And
Speaker 1: when light hits this array of squares or photo sites,
Speaker 1: each of these squares builds up an electrical charge relative
Speaker 1: to the intensity of light that hit it. So if
Speaker 1: one square was hit with more intense light, it's going
Speaker 1: to have a different charge than that one that just
Speaker 1: got a tiny bit of light. But collectively, all of
Speaker 1: these squares capture an image in the form of an
Speaker 1: electrical charge at this point. But to transfer that charge
Speaker 1: and turn it into data, the CCD shifts the image
Speaker 1: across the strips of alumnum or whatever other metal might
Speaker 1: have been used. So it's kind of like the image
Speaker 1: is moving row by row across the CCD To transfer
Speaker 1: to the camera's memory. You get a row of charges
Speaker 1: that gets transferred through an analog to digital converter and
Speaker 1: goes to the processor, and the next row moves in,
Speaker 1: so it's like bottom row is gone, next row comes down.
Speaker 1: Sort of thing, not necessarily bottom, but you get the idea.
Speaker 1: But it reminds me of how in the bad old
Speaker 1: days of dial up internet, you would go to a
Speaker 1: web page and if it had images on it, you
Speaker 1: would watch as the image would load one row of
Speaker 1: pixels at a time. It's kind of like that, except
Speaker 1: in this case we're talking about shifting charges off a
Speaker 1: grid of photosites and into memory one row at a time. Also,
Speaker 1: the electrical signal again passes through an amplifier, so it's
Speaker 1: an analog. It goes through an amplifier than an analog
Speaker 1: to digital converter, and this is in order to have
Speaker 1: a signal strong enough to be able to actually scan. Now,
Speaker 1: remember a pixel is a point of light, so each
Speaker 1: of these photosites is corresponding to a pixel in the image.
Speaker 1: So a digital image consists of lots of these little
Speaker 1: points of light, and collectively they represent the overall picture.
Speaker 1: The more densely packed you have pixels of light, and
Speaker 1: the more pixels that are there, generally speaking, the smoother
Speaker 1: the picture is. If you have fewer pixels, it's going
Speaker 1: to be a clunky picture. And I always describe this
Speaker 1: as imagine you've got a collection of wooden blocks and
Speaker 1: they're of different colors, and you're instructed to make an
Speaker 1: image of a let's say it's a flower using these
Speaker 1: wooden blocks. And let's say that the woodenlo are you know,
Speaker 1: an inch to a side, and you've got you know,
Speaker 1: enough to be able to make a picture, well an
Speaker 1: inch to a side, it's probably going to be a
Speaker 1: pretty clunky looking flower, unless you're building so that you're
Speaker 1: taking an image from like twenty stories up or something.
Speaker 1: So then let's say that you were given blocks that
Speaker 1: were half an inch to a side, and you've got
Speaker 1: more blocks now to build an image of a flower. Well,
Speaker 1: that flower is probably going to look a little less
Speaker 1: blocky than the first one, let's say a quarter inch
Speaker 1: to a side, and so on and so on. As
Speaker 1: the pixels get smaller and you're able to pack them
Speaker 1: more densely together, the resulting image you get is of
Speaker 1: a higher resolution. In order to make that happen, these
Speaker 1: CCDs have to have a grid of photo sites that
Speaker 1: are corresponding to all those pixels, so keep that in mind.
Speaker 1: By the way, the CCD, like I said, is not
Speaker 1: the only type of sensor for digital photography. The other
Speaker 1: major type is called a complementary metal oxide semiconduct And
Speaker 1: in this context, complementary doesn't mean the sensor says, hey,
Speaker 1: you're looking sharp. Let's take a photo. The initialism for
Speaker 1: this phrase is ce moss CMOS, and when we come
Speaker 1: back we'll talk more about how a sea moss works
Speaker 1: and how it is fundamentally different from CCD. We'll also
Speaker 1: mention again that SEAMS predates CCD. But before we get
Speaker 1: into all that, let's take a quick break to think
Speaker 1: our sponsors. Okay, we're back and we're going to talk
Speaker 1: about ce MOS. So, like a CCD, a SEAMS sensor
Speaker 1: converts you know, photons of light into an electrical charge,
Speaker 1: But unlike a CCD, each photodiode or pixel in a
Speaker 1: sea moss sensor has its own amplifier, so these are
Speaker 1: individually wired, whereas CCDs aren't. So rather than scanning the
Speaker 1: charge just one row at a time, a SEAMAS sensor
Speaker 1: sends an amplified signal from each photo site to an
Speaker 1: analog to digital converter. Now this means that SEMAS sensors
Speaker 1: create more noise than CCD sensors visual noise right, That
Speaker 1: means you can get some artifacts due to electrical leakage.
Speaker 1: Even so, SEMAS sensors are really prominent in embedded vision
Speaker 1: applications in fact, they've overtaken CCDs. Now. One reason for
Speaker 1: that is that SEMAS sensors draw less power than CCDs,
Speaker 1: so you can extend battery life for example, which is
Speaker 1: you know, that's a big deal, or you can make
Speaker 1: it a smaller battery. Either way, right, you can either say, well,
Speaker 1: i can use a smaller battery because I'm not drawing
Speaker 1: as much power, so I can have just as much charge,
Speaker 1: but I can reduce the weight of the overall unit.
Speaker 1: If we're talking about a headset, that's a big deal,
Speaker 1: right if you're going to be wearing that for hours.
Speaker 1: Or conversely, you could say, well, we're going to keep
Speaker 1: the battery the same size, but now we'll be able
Speaker 1: to power the device longer than we could if we
Speaker 1: were to use a CCD sensor. SEMAS sensors are also
Speaker 1: far less expensive than CCDs, so that make them makes
Speaker 1: them a really attractive option when you're trying to keep
Speaker 1: product prices under control, unless you're Apple, in which case
Speaker 1: you just crank that number up as high or even
Speaker 1: higher than the market will allow. Anyway, for the early
Speaker 1: days of digital cameras, CCDs were really where it was at.
Speaker 1: It would take years of work to mitigate the issues
Speaker 1: with noise reduction in seams technology for those sensors to
Speaker 1: really catch up and then take the lead. So a
Speaker 1: lot of the rest of this episode is really going
Speaker 1: to be about devices that used CCD sensors. Just know
Speaker 1: that eventually Sea Moss took their place. Now back to Sassin,
Speaker 1: right if you forgot. He's the guy I talked about
Speaker 1: before the break. He's the one who built an early
Speaker 1: prototype digital camera. So his boss, Gareth Lloyd, had suspected
Speaker 1: that the charge coupled device or CCD might make a
Speaker 1: practical use in photography, so he gave Sassin a dream assignment.
Speaker 1: He said, you know, see what you can do with
Speaker 1: this thing. See if you can make something out of it.
Speaker 1: Because Sassin had a background in electrical engineering, and while
Speaker 1: he was working for Kodak, people were worried that he
Speaker 1: would get into trouble because he was apparently very curious
Speaker 1: kind of guy, as in curious as in how does
Speaker 1: this work? Not man? That guy is weird. So Sassin
Speaker 1: has said that hardly anyone knew about his project, but
Speaker 1: it wasn't because it was some sort of top secret project. Instead,
Speaker 1: it was seen in such a small operation that no
Speaker 1: one really knew it was going on, just you know.
Speaker 1: Was also not a straight path from assignment to complete
Speaker 1: a project. He said it was a lot of learning
Speaker 1: and a lot of mistakes along the way, and that
Speaker 1: often he questioned the wisdom of agreeing to do the
Speaker 1: project in the first place. But in December nineteen seventy
Speaker 1: five he had himself a prototype and his camera was
Speaker 1: a bit of a Frankenstein's monster, so he had salvaged
Speaker 1: a lens from a Super eight film camera. The circuitry
Speaker 1: mixed analog and digital elements, or he had to include
Speaker 1: an analog digital converter in this as well. The CCD
Speaker 1: array was also part of this. Obviously, there was more
Speaker 1: than a dozen nickel cadmium batteries to power the thing,
Speaker 1: and it weighed nearly nine pounds, pretty hefty for a
Speaker 1: digital camera. You would not want to carry one of
Speaker 1: those around on casual outings. It had no mechanical shutter.
Speaker 1: Assassin did incorporate an electronic shutter with a shutter speed
Speaker 1: of one twentieth of a second, and he discovered that
Speaker 1: the CCD was sensitive to infrared light and that this
Speaker 1: would sometimes cause issues when he was taking images indoors,
Speaker 1: so he also added an infrared filter to block IR out.
Speaker 1: As for memory, while he decided to go straight to storage,
Speaker 1: he used a tape assembly as in magnetic tape, so
Speaker 1: it worked on a principle similar to audio cassettes or
Speaker 1: VHS tapes or cam quarters old tape based camquarders. There
Speaker 1: are pictures of this prototype online. You should check it
Speaker 1: out if you are curious, because it really does look
Speaker 1: like of Frankenstein's monster. It is an odd collection of parts.
Speaker 1: The digital camera could capture images at a resolution of
Speaker 1: one hundred pixels by one hundred pixels, so in my
Speaker 1: example of using wooden blocks, it would be as if
Speaker 1: you had, you know, ten thousand blocks in order to
Speaker 1: make a picture, and it could be one hundred blocks
Speaker 1: per side. So yeah, the full image would be approximately
Speaker 1: ten thousand pixels. Much later we would talk about digital
Speaker 1: camera resolution in terms of megapixels or millions of pixels.
Speaker 1: So ten thousand pixels is a far cry from what
Speaker 1: we would see with consumer digital cameras or the kind
Speaker 1: that's even in your phone. But you know, it was
Speaker 1: a start, and we'll get back to megapixels. As it
Speaker 1: turns out when you hear a camera has a fifteen
Speaker 1: megapixel sensor in it or whatever. That doesn't necessarily mean
Speaker 1: that all those pixels are going to end up in
Speaker 1: the final image. But we'll get back to that. So
Speaker 1: Sassin showed off his work to his colleagues over at Kodak,
Speaker 1: and he took photos with this very weird camera and
Speaker 1: then he popped the tape out of the camera and
Speaker 1: inserted it into a playback device that was connected to
Speaker 1: a television, so again similar to something like a VCR.
Speaker 1: He showed how the images would display on the TV
Speaker 1: screen and his peers they thought it was interesting, but
Speaker 1: they didn't really see a practical application. I mean, who
Speaker 1: the heck would want to look at their photos on
Speaker 1: their television? To them, it seemed impractical and unrealistic. Keep
Speaker 1: in mind, this is still really before personal computers had
Speaker 1: taken off, so Assassin's work was largely dismissed. It's also
Speaker 1: worth pointing out that Kodak was very much in the
Speaker 1: film business, so not only did film seem to be
Speaker 1: the winning strategy at the time, it was the crux
Speaker 1: of their entire enterprise. The company had an incentive to
Speaker 1: dismiss digital photography because digital photography doesn't need film or
Speaker 1: processing or development. You don't need any of that. It's
Speaker 1: all the stuff that was the foundation of Kodak's business.
Speaker 1: So you could argue that Kodak partly ignored digital photography
Speaker 1: because it it was really inconvenient to its established business strategy.
Speaker 1: I've heard similar arguments made against certain car companies and
Speaker 1: their slow move to develop fully electric vehicles that because
Speaker 1: that was inconvenient to their business strategy, they purposefully ignored
Speaker 1: it and then got left behind. Anyway, while Sassin's invention
Speaker 1: was neat, it was really ahead of its time. I mean,
Speaker 1: in nineteen seventy five, we're just getting into the very
Speaker 1: earliest days of personal computers, for goodness sakes, and at
Speaker 1: that time really only nerdy hobbyists were into PCs. While
Speaker 1: Kodak arguably made a big old whoopsie by not pursuing
Speaker 1: digital photography earlier, you can hardly blame the company for
Speaker 1: not embracing a tech that just didn't really have a
Speaker 1: place in the industry just yet. Sassin would still work
Speaker 1: on R and D with digital cameras, as did other
Speaker 1: engineers around the world. One problem that needed solving was
Speaker 1: how to capture color because the CCD could convert light
Speaker 1: to electrical current, but there was no information about color
Speaker 1: in that signal, so you would end up with a
Speaker 1: black and white photograph. To get color, you would need
Speaker 1: to add a filter of some sort and then program
Speaker 1: a processor to interpret the charges coming through in order
Speaker 1: to add color to the final image. So typically you
Speaker 1: would do this with a mosaic of filters, and you
Speaker 1: would have rows that often would alternate red and green
Speaker 1: squares at the top row, and then the next row
Speaker 1: would be blue and green squares, and then back to
Speaker 1: red and green and so on, and so you would
Speaker 1: just have this grid of little squares alternating between these colors,
Speaker 1: and each filter would block light of its corresponding color
Speaker 1: from passing through, so only light from other colors would
Speaker 1: make it through that filter. So a blue filter blocks
Speaker 1: blue light and a green filter blocks green light, et cetera.
Speaker 1: Now this affects the intensity of the light that actually
Speaker 1: reaches the CCD, and thus it affects the electrical charge.
Speaker 1: As I said, you have to program the processor to
Speaker 1: do this, but the processor can interpret these values and
Speaker 1: apply that rotation to determine the color that each pixel
Speaker 1: should show. This also involves some error correction. The processor
Speaker 1: determines each pixel's color in part by comparing it to
Speaker 1: neighboring pixels, which sounds weird, right, Like you're saying, what
Speaker 1: color is pixel twelve? Well, let's look at pixels eleven
Speaker 1: and thirteen, and let's also look above and below this pixel,
Speaker 1: and all of that together will help us determine what
Speaker 1: color it should be. But you got to think, well,
Speaker 1: you have to do this to all the pixels all
Speaker 1: the same time, right, It's not like you just magically
Speaker 1: have determined one pixels color. So very interesting stuff. But
Speaker 1: let's skip ahead to the nineteen eighties now. As I said,
Speaker 1: numerous engineers worked on advancing digital camera technology, though at
Speaker 1: this point there really weren't any digital cameras on the market.
Speaker 1: A few sectors were making use of early digital cameras,
Speaker 1: but this was like stuff like in you know, high
Speaker 1: tech military applications and sometimes medical or scientific applications, but
Speaker 1: it would take a lot more time to become a
Speaker 1: practical consumer electronic device. Now up in the Great White North.
Speaker 1: That's an affectionate term for Canada, in case you're not
Speaker 1: familiar with that phrase. The University of Calgary's science team
Speaker 1: designed a digital camera to take pictures of the sky
Speaker 1: to catch the northern lights you know, auroras. In other words,
Speaker 1: they used CCDs similar to what Sassin had used, the
Speaker 1: old one hundred by one hundred pixel kind, and their
Speaker 1: design was all digital. They didn't have analog circuits like
Speaker 1: Sassin's design did, although they still had to you know,
Speaker 1: convert stuff, because electrical current is still an analog signal. Ultimately, well,
Speaker 1: in the mid nineteen eighties, the Japanese company Nikon created
Speaker 1: the first digital single lens reflex camera or DSLR camera. However,
Speaker 1: this prototype, called the Nikon SVC, which stood for still
Speaker 1: video Camera, wasn't entirely digital. It used an analog format
Speaker 1: for media storage. Still, Nikon's work would lead to an
Speaker 1: incredibly popular form factor a few years down the road.
Speaker 1: And you might owe, my Drew Giz wonder what a
Speaker 1: digital single lens reflex camera even means. Now you've definitely
Speaker 1: seen them, you might own one, you might use one
Speaker 1: all the time, But what makes a DSLR camera? Well,
Speaker 1: to answer that, it's good to first just focus on
Speaker 1: the SLR part, because those cameras predated the digital kind.
Speaker 1: We had film based ones, so a single lens reflex
Speaker 1: camera uses a peculiar arrangement of mirrors so that the
Speaker 1: photographer can see through the viewfinder and they're looking exactly
Speaker 1: at what they're about to capture when they snap a photo.
Speaker 1: I'll see if I can explain it here. It is
Speaker 1: tricky without visual aids. But light comes inside the camera
Speaker 1: through the lens right, so the lens focuses light into
Speaker 1: the camera. Now, normally it would just aim this light
Speaker 1: back toward the aperture, but in front of the aperture
Speaker 1: is a mirror that's angled, so it reflects light upward
Speaker 1: into the camera toward the viewfinder. Now, the light doesn't
Speaker 1: go straight to the viewfinder. Instead, the light hits what's
Speaker 1: called a penta mirror, and as the name implies, pina mirror,
Speaker 1: it is a five sided mirror. This mirror bounces the
Speaker 1: light around so that it can aim correctly for the
Speaker 1: viewfinder as well as you know, not be all upside
Speaker 1: down and reversed and everything. This allows the photographer to
Speaker 1: see the scene as it is seen through the lens,
Speaker 1: and that means that they have a clear idea of
Speaker 1: what they're about to capture. Now, this is in contrast
Speaker 1: to other kinds of cameras which might use a separate
Speaker 1: set of optics just for the viewfinder, which means the
Speaker 1: photographer is seeing the image through a different optical path
Speaker 1: than what is going to hit the film, so you
Speaker 1: can you can have some discrepancies there, But with this approach,
Speaker 1: the SLR approach, you're looking at the exact same light
Speaker 1: that is ultimately going to hit your medium, whether it's
Speaker 1: film or a CCD or SEMAS. So snapping a photo
Speaker 1: means that the first reflecting mirror, the one that it
Speaker 1: captures the light from the lens and knocks it up
Speaker 1: to the penta mirror. That mirror actually moves out of
Speaker 1: the way as the shutter opens, and that lets light
Speaker 1: pass beyond the mirror, go past the shutter, go through
Speaker 1: the aperture, and then hit the exposed medium at the
Speaker 1: end of the sequence. You know, at the end of
Speaker 1: this moment, the mirror moves back in place and the
Speaker 1: shutter closes of the film advances. So for just a second,
Speaker 1: when you do snap that picture, you no longer have
Speaker 1: a visual pathway through that optical lens through the viewfinder,
Speaker 1: so your view is shut off for a moment. With
Speaker 1: digital SLRs, like I said, the whole process is the same.
Speaker 1: It's just instead of film, you're exposing a CCD or
Speaker 1: C moss to light. But the basic concept is otherwise identical.
Speaker 1: A series of mirrors provides the photographer a view of
Speaker 1: what they're about to capture, and it's pretty darn neat all, right.
Speaker 1: But we also had the phrase still video camera, right,
Speaker 1: that was what Nikon was using an SVC, So what
Speaker 1: the heck is that? Well, in the nineteen eighties, one
Speaker 1: line of research that pre dates the consumer digital camera
Speaker 1: was to capture still images as if they were a
Speaker 1: single frame of video. So each still photo would be
Speaker 1: a single frame in a video as if you were
Speaker 1: shooting video itself. Those frames could be stored on magnetic tape,
Speaker 1: similar to vhs. These were not digital cameras because they
Speaker 1: stored information in analog format, and they didn't become popular
Speaker 1: consumer products either. It was more like a developmental step
Speaker 1: toward digital cameras. They bridged a gap between purely analog
Speaker 1: and purely digital and film and digital. They had some
Speaker 1: limited use in the late eighties and early nineties, primarily
Speaker 1: in things like journalism, so they were being used in
Speaker 1: various industries. They just weren't making their way to the
Speaker 1: consumer market now. According to CNET, what should have been
Speaker 1: the first handheld digital camera was the Fuji DS one P,
Speaker 1: which was produced in nineteen eighty eight, and it would
Speaker 1: store images in digital file formats and save to a
Speaker 1: memory car holding sixteen whole megabytes of storage space. But
Speaker 1: this camera never graduated into becoming an actual product. Instead,
Speaker 1: the first digital camera sold in the US as a
Speaker 1: consumer product was the Diecam Model one, also known as
Speaker 1: the Logitech Photo Man in nineteen ninety. We'll talk more
Speaker 1: about this early digital camera after we take a quick
Speaker 1: break to thank our sponsors. So we're back and we're
Speaker 1: talking about the Diecam Model one, the first digital camera
Speaker 1: sold in the United States. Keep in mind there are
Speaker 1: other cameras that were sold in other parts of the world,
Speaker 1: but I'm based in the US, so there's the bias,
Speaker 1: and I'm guessing there wasn't a ton of confidence behind
Speaker 1: this new technology. According to the Digital Camera Museum, the
Speaker 1: Diecam Model one shipped in quote unquote plane boxes and
Speaker 1: that they typically have very small serial numbers. Like their
Speaker 1: serial numbers are four days, digits and lengths, which indicates
Speaker 1: a pretty small number of them were ever manufactured. Right,
Speaker 1: If you think that limits you up to zero zero
Speaker 1: zero zero to nine nine ninety nine, well that's ten
Speaker 1: thousand units. That's not very many, and that's if you
Speaker 1: use every single variation of the four digits for that
Speaker 1: serial number. The manufacturer suggested retail price for the Diecam
Speaker 1: Model one was a hefty nine hundred and ninety five dollars.
Speaker 1: Now keep in mind this is nineteen ninety, so we
Speaker 1: have to adjust for inflation. If we do that, then
Speaker 1: that means the Diecam Model one would cost around twenty
Speaker 1: four hundred dollars today. Not unheard of for digital cameras.
Speaker 1: I mean, there are some out there that are much
Speaker 1: more expensive, but yeah, pretty hefty price tag. This camera
Speaker 1: had a massive whole single megabyte of storage space. That's
Speaker 1: me being a little cheeky there. As for image resolution,
Speaker 1: it was just three hundred and seventy two by two
Speaker 1: hundred forty pixels, which if you multiply those together that
Speaker 1: means total you get eighty nine two hundred eighty pixels.
Speaker 1: So still nowhere closed to the megapixel range. Now, this
Speaker 1: is a good time to talk about stuff like resolution
Speaker 1: and megapixels. As I mentioned, earlier. Just because the device
Speaker 1: might be marketed as having a certain number of megapixels
Speaker 1: doesn't mean that every single pixel is actually used in
Speaker 1: the final image that you capture. Some of those pixels
Speaker 1: might be used for things like error correction and image
Speaker 1: stabilization in the processing phase, so it leaves you with
Speaker 1: fewer pixels to make up the actual image itself. So,
Speaker 1: for example, according to Canon's website, the Canon PowerShot V
Speaker 1: ten is marketed as a twenty point nine megapixel sensor camera. However,
Speaker 1: if you're shooting video, you actually end up with a
Speaker 1: thirteen point one megapixel resolution video, and if you're shooting
Speaker 1: still images, then those images are going to have fifteen
Speaker 1: point two megapixels. So while the camera has twenty point
Speaker 1: nine megapixels on the sensor, none of those megapixels are
Speaker 1: actually making it to the final images. I don't think
Speaker 1: it's really as big a deal these days, but once
Speaker 1: upon a time, megapixels was kind of shorthand for digital
Speaker 1: camera quality, which was a bit misleading, and generally speaking,
Speaker 1: people thought, Okay, a bigger number is better, right, that
Speaker 1: just makes it easy. So that meant if you were
Speaker 1: looking in the store and you had two different digital
Speaker 1: camera boxes in front of you, and one of them
Speaker 1: says it's a ten megapixel digital camera, and the other
Speaker 1: one says it's a twelve megapixel camera. Well, clearly the
Speaker 1: twelve megapixel has to be superior. Except it's not as
Speaker 1: simple as that, because the megapixel thing really does just
Speaker 1: describe resolution, and it's true that lower resolution images are
Speaker 1: more blocky and not as smooth as higher resolution pictures,
Speaker 1: So it does matter. Resolution does matter, But once you
Speaker 1: get beyond a certain point, then you're not really likely
Speaker 1: to notice a change in resolution unless you're taking an
Speaker 1: image and then you're zooming into extreme levels, like you're
Speaker 1: doing a massive digital zoom into the image, or if
Speaker 1: you're taking that digital image and then you want to
Speaker 1: print it out and you're going to blow it up
Speaker 1: into like a banner or something, then you're going to
Speaker 1: be able to notice a real difference in resolution. But
Speaker 1: beyond that, you're probably not going to be able to
Speaker 1: tell the difference between two different high resolution cameras. Other
Speaker 1: features like color representation and contrast, which is the difference
Speaker 1: between the brightest colors and the darkest colors, these things
Speaker 1: can make a huge difference in image quality, so it's
Speaker 1: not just resolution, and it's quite possible for a camera
Speaker 1: that has a sensor with fewer photo sits on it
Speaker 1: to still produce better images than one that has a
Speaker 1: metric buttload of photo sits on its sensor. Anyway, in
Speaker 1: parallel with the development of digital cameras came file formats
Speaker 1: like JPEGs, and also you got photo editing software like
Speaker 1: Photoshop or digital Darkroom, and so everything was kind of
Speaker 1: converging toward digital cameras becoming a viable consumer product in
Speaker 1: the early nineteen nineties, although most of them were still
Speaker 1: wicked expensive, so a lot of folks like yours truly
Speaker 1: stuck with film cameras for several more years. In nineteen
Speaker 1: ninety four, Apple even got into the act. Apple released
Speaker 1: a digital camera. You might not have known that that
Speaker 1: Apple had a digital camera. Once upon a time, you
Speaker 1: could buy an Apple branded digital camera and it wasn't
Speaker 1: part of a phone. It was called the Apple Quick
Speaker 1: Take one hundred at least the original was, and it
Speaker 1: boasted a resolution of six hundred and forty by four
Speaker 1: hundred eighty pixels. Now I did say Apple branded. I
Speaker 1: did not say Apple built, because, as it turns out,
Speaker 1: the Apple Quick Take one hundred was actually made by Kodak,
Speaker 1: the company that had kind of slept on digital photography.
Speaker 1: The two hundred, the Apple Quick Take two hundred would
Speaker 1: actually be made by Fujifilm. So this was kind of
Speaker 1: in a dark time for Apple. The company would be
Speaker 1: in a rather slow decline until Steve Jobs would return
Speaker 1: to the company in nineteen ninety seven and really shake
Speaker 1: things up again. And it would actually take a few
Speaker 1: years for Apple to find its footing. So you'd be
Speaker 1: forgiven if you didn't know that Apple released a digital
Speaker 1: camera back at this time, because the company was seen
Speaker 1: as something of a joke in the industry. Scenet's Richard
Speaker 1: Trenholm documents that in nineteen ninety four, Olympus produced a
Speaker 1: camera called the Deltis VC eleven hundred, which you could
Speaker 1: connect to a modem so you could actually send digital
Speaker 1: photos online. That's pretty early for ninety four. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's amazing, as Trenholm rits, quote, it took about six
Speaker 1: minutes to transmit an image end quote Yahalza, and we're
Speaker 1: still talking about relatively low resolution images here, because the
Speaker 1: camera had a max resolution of seven hundred and sixty
Speaker 1: eight by five hundred and seventy six pixels. As the
Speaker 1: nineteen nineties went on, digital cameras would creep further into
Speaker 1: the consumer marketplace, though for a lot of us, film
Speaker 1: was still the way to go because digital cameras were
Speaker 1: still pretty expensive. I would argue that the real seed
Speaker 1: change would be when cameras found their way into cellular phones,
Speaker 1: which happened at the close of the decade. So there
Speaker 1: were cheaper digital cameras that would come out over the
Speaker 1: nineteen nineties. I mean I even finally bought one late
Speaker 1: in the nineties, but they were pretty primitive. They were
Speaker 1: like point and shoot cameras. You could get professional grade
Speaker 1: digital cameras, but they were much more expensive and very
Speaker 1: few people were purchasing them. There were very few reasons
Speaker 1: to do it. Like we're still talking at an era
Speaker 1: where it's before social media, and only a few websites
Speaker 1: were starting to offer things like digital storage for photographs,
Speaker 1: So where were you going to display your digital images?
Speaker 1: A lot of people didn't really jump on the bandwagon
Speaker 1: because there really weren't ways to easily not just take
Speaker 1: digital photos, but experience them. So things would start to
Speaker 1: change in the late nineties and nineteen ninety nine, the
Speaker 1: Kyo Serrah Visual Phone VP two ten came out in Japan.
Speaker 1: It had a front facing camera and it was people
Speaker 1: taking images at one hundred and ten thousand pixels and
Speaker 1: it could hold up to twenty JPEG images. The phone
Speaker 1: itself was in the candy bar style, complete with physical keys,
Speaker 1: because this is way before touchscreen phones would become the norm,
Speaker 1: and you could send the photos via email over Japan's
Speaker 1: mobile phone network system. It was exclusive to Japan. As
Speaker 1: far as I can tell, it retailed for around three
Speaker 1: hundred and twenty five dollars in nineteen ninety nine. If
Speaker 1: we adjust for inflation, that's like six hundred and ten
Speaker 1: bucks for today. Not bad, I mean smartphones are much
Speaker 1: more expensive today. But obviously it would take some time
Speaker 1: for handset manufacturers to start including digital camera sensors and
Speaker 1: lenses in mobile phones as kind of a standard option.
Speaker 1: But really the dye had been cast, and as we
Speaker 1: edged toward the era of the consumer smartphone and the
Speaker 1: debut of the Apple iPhone, the writing would be on
Speaker 1: the wall for digital cameras. Like again, they haven't disappeared
Speaker 1: and you can still find them, but the smartphone would
Speaker 1: mean that fewer people would really invest in getting a
Speaker 1: digital camera, just as fewer people invest in a standard
Speaker 1: mobile media player, because our phones can do all of that. Right.
Speaker 1: We can largely thank Apple for this, because the iPhone
Speaker 1: really did usher in that age, and honestly, I think
Speaker 1: it's pretty cool. I still think that, you know, digital
Speaker 1: cameras are awesome, and standalone ones are amazing. It's just
Speaker 1: that I think most people don't need one. They can
Speaker 1: use just their phone to do all that stuff. Maybe
Speaker 1: if you're into things like vlogging, or maybe you're a
Speaker 1: Twitch streamer or something like that, or you're a photographer,
Speaker 1: then obviously digital cameras still have a very viable place
Speaker 1: in your day to day life, but for the rest
Speaker 1: of us not as much. But that's just a quick
Speaker 1: rundown on the early history of digital cameras. There's obviously
Speaker 1: a lot more to it than that. I could do
Speaker 1: a full episode just about the still video camera technology
Speaker 1: and how it played a part in journalism at the
Speaker 1: end of the nineteen eighties. And again, some of y'all
Speaker 1: out there might have a few digital cameras that you use,
Speaker 1: particularly if you do any vlogging or Twitch streaming or
Speaker 1: anything like that. But I just wanted to kind of
Speaker 1: look back and reflect, as it were. If it's a DSLR,
Speaker 1: you're literally reflecting. But yeah, I wanted to think back
Speaker 1: on the history of these cameras and to really get
Speaker 1: a decent understanding of the two major technologies that dominate
Speaker 1: the space. But that's it for this episode. I hope
Speaker 1: you are all well, and I'll talk to you again
Speaker 1: really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more
Speaker 1: podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
Speaker 1: wherever you listen to your favorite shows.