What the inventor of the world's first digital camera has to say about digital photography today?

My last post left me thinking about how digital imaging is changing the way we communicate.

We email images, exchange them on Flikr, post them on Facebook.

Photo and video cameras are cheap and easily accessible not only as

stand alone devices, but in our computers and cell phones. Most of us have a camera at hand at all times.

Coincidentally, in the line of my work, I have just had an honor to

meet the inventor of

the world’s first digital camera, Mr. Steven Sasson. I asked him several questions about what he thought abo

ut the state of digital photography today.

He shared my fascination with the modern technology:

“Digital imaging today is ubiquitous,” he said. “It used to be a way to memorialize the event or a gathering. Now digital images are used as a part of casual conversation we all have. Pictures are everywhere, they are easy to capture, easy to store, easy to find. And I think it’s changing the way we live. To some extent we all are better behaved now because we all know that we are on camera almost all the time.”

But even though this visionary has retired from his engineering career at Kodak already, he still can not take his

inventor’s hat off, and so his brain is constantly working thinking about the challenges ahead in the development of tech.

“The technology has taken us to the point now where I think we challenge ourselves in how we are going to use this, to make it helpful for us.” Mr. Sasson continued. “I see no limit to it, I see challenges in being able to find, and to present and to communicate our images, because we take more and more all the time, but where are all those pictures going? How are they going to create a record of our world? And how do we find them? So I would imagine that the archivists are quite challenged now by what’s going on with digital imaging. “

But still, when I asked him to make a prediction of what’s coming our way next, even Mr. Sasson shook his head:

“Where it’s going to go? I must tell you I don’t know. I am as amazed as anybody else when I see some of these new developments that come along. I’m just astounded at the price, the reliability, the utility and the imagination that’s in these new products that come out. I’m very excited.”

If you didn’t know, Mr. Sasson’s digital camera took its first picture in 1975. The camera had a resolution of 0.01 megapixels. It took 23 seconds to record a black and white digital image to a magnetic cassette tape. A special playback unit read the information off the cassette and displayed the image on a television set. It was a first camera that didn’t need any film to take a shot, had no moving mechanical parts and didn’t need any paper to reproduce the image. It weighted 8 pounds, though.

Mr. Sasson also joked that if he knew at the time it was going to become so successful, he would have built it to look more beautiful. You definitely couldn’t fit this one in a cell phone. Oh wait, there were no cell phones back then.

I borrowed some images from that article on Kodak's website, to make it easier for you to check them out.