It is ironic that Kodak invented the product that would kill the company. He decided to forget it, because it was too far ahead of its time.
The story of Kodak it is so important and huge in the world of photography, as it is tragic. She maintained her success for almost a century, but was condemned to oblivion for the device that she invented herself: portable digital camera.
Kodak was founded in 1892 by George Eastman and Henry A. Strong. Eastman basically invented the photo reel, forever banishing the use of expensive and delicate crystals to store photographs, which were used until that time.
Thanks to Kodak, affordable cameras, light, that used reels (photographic film) to save the images, and later develop them on paper.
Throughout the 20th century Kodak dominated the photographic market with the sale of cameras, film, and photo development shops and laboratories.
There were dozens of thousands of development points around the world, generating a business as prosperous as Samsung or Apple can be in the mobile world today.
But in 1975, a space-time anomaly occurred in Kodak’s near-perfect universe. One of your engineers, Steven sasson, invented the first ever portable digital camera, which did not need reels or development. You can see it in the opening photo of the news.
It was portable, but you couldn’t hold it for long, because weighed 3.6 Kilos. It used the same technique that we still use today on mobiles, with a CCD sensor that converted captured light into pixels.
Of course, it was a black and white sensor of only 100 x 100 pixels, that is to say, 0.01 Mpx.
The most curious of all is that digital photos were saved in an analog medium: a cassette tape. Since this device was recording data at low speed, the digital photo was temporarily stored in a RAM memory.
The capture time of each photo was … 23 seconds.
Kodak had the future of photography before him, and she had invented it. But… decided to abandon digital technology and stick with reels. The reason his bosses gave Steven Sasson is that “Who is going to want to take photos that they can’t see on paper? “.
Today it seems like an absurd excuse to us, but in 1975 it made a lot of sense. At that time, personal computers didn’t even exist, not hard drives, not portable screens. And much less, mobile phones.
There was no way to view those photos stored on cassette tape in a simple way, except with a very expensive equipment on a TV, or using a digital printer, which had not yet been invented.
But it is easy to assume that Kodak was scared too. Although he decided to make digital cameras and they were a success, his business was not in the sale of cameras, but in the sale of reels and in the development of photos. And that business would be lost with digital cameras, as it happened.
This decision possibly delayed the advent of digital cameras by a decade. But when they were released on mobile phones, with the Sharp -SH04 in 2000, Kodak’s fate was doomed.
Just 12 years later, in 2012, Kodak filed for bankruptcy. Nobody revealed photos anymore. Now she is still active, but focused on other activities, such as pharmaceuticals or the sale of the biggest puzzle in the world.
Unfortunately, we will never know what would have happened if, 46 years ago, Kodak had gone ahead with the development of that first digital still camera.