[HN Gopher] How Steve Sasson Invented the Digital Camera
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How Steve Sasson Invented the Digital Camera
Author : bookofjoe
Score : 41 points
Date : 2022-09-13 11:57 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (petapixel.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (petapixel.com)
| mrwh wrote:
| I'm genuinely curious here: is first mover advantage real? I can
| think of plenty of examples where the second mouse got the
| cheese, so to speak (digital cameras being one; search another;
| electric cars another, etc etc). Where has being the first, as
| opposed to the cheapest or best, really mattered?
| jeffbee wrote:
| Kodak was the first mover and they totally dominated the
| digital photography business for the first decade of its
| existence. There's this misinformed folk meme that somehow they
| didn't know what they had on their hands, but there's no
| evidence that I can see of that.
|
| Kodak shipped a 1.3-megapixel camera 34 years ago! They had
| literally zero competitors for the first 11 years of the
| market. They owned all the patents and everyone had to license
| them.
| mrwh wrote:
| Yep! Being the first mover doesn't seem to have helped Kodak
| much. They spent what must have been huge amounts on r&d -
| all to ultimately destroy their film cash cow, and be taken
| over by electronics firms.
| jcynix wrote:
| And Kodak built the first two versions of Apple's QuickTake
| digicam:
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_QuickTake
|
| I still have some grainy images taken with either a 100 or
| 150 model somewhere in my archives.
|
| But somehow Kodak managed to become the DEC of digital
| photography.
| smm11 wrote:
| Kodak could have owned digital photography, and Canon could have
| been Apple.
|
| VW could crush Chevy and Ford if they just tried.
| thehappypm wrote:
| How so? By lying to regulators ?
| dboreham wrote:
| Also James Clark Maxwell.
| timonoko wrote:
| Kodak DC20 was de facto first digital pocket camera 1996. It was
| Sasson's camera implemented the very moment it was technically
| and economically feasible.
|
| It was not better than frames from video, but much smaller than
| Sony Handycam. As a selfie-camera it was quite reasonable:
| https://photos.app.goo.gl/sbG9uneEHakBMMSu5
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I remember running into some Kodak digital camera engineers at a
| FlashPix[0] conference, last century.
|
| Every single one of them was complaining about how their budget
| and work was being strangled by the film people.
|
| I knew, at that point, that Kodak was "dead man walking."
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FlashPix
| causi wrote:
| The article glosses over the fact that Sasson was not the one to
| create and use a CCD to capture an image. That was Gil Amelio,
| Michael Francis Tompsett and George Smith in April 1970, five
| years earlier. Sasson was the man behind the first _commercial_
| digital camera.
| doh wrote:
| Wait, the same Gil Amelio that ran Apple? Need to read more on
| him. What an amazing tidbit.
| camhenlin wrote:
| Yes, check out the bottom of his wikipedia page:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gil_Amelio
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(page generated 2022-09-14 23:01 UTC)