Back
in Apple's dark ages — during Steve Jobs' interregnum in the mid-1990s —
the company experimented with some strange products. Everyone remembers
the ill-fated Newton PDA, for instance, which was considered ahead of
its time. Less memorable was the QuickTake 100, the first mass market
color consumer digital camera.
First
unveiled at the Tokyo MacWorld Expo on February 17, 1994, the QuickTake
100 went on sale 20 years ago from yesterday — June 20, 1994. It was
priced at $749 and initiated the age of consumer digital photography.
One
reason why the QuickTake 100 is not often mentioned as an Apple
breakthrough — other than the fact that Jobs' himself had nothing to do
with it — was that it's one of the few non-computer products Apple
produced and one Apple itself didn't design.
The
QuickTake 100, which captured and stored eight 640 x 480 pixel (or 16
320 x 240 pixel 24-bit color images) was the product of the inventor of
the digital camera: Kodak. Afraid of jeopardizing its film business,
Kodak didn't want its own name on its own creation, just one in a long
series of digital camera history ironies.
What's
even less known is how that first binocular-shaped digital camera
started out 20 years earlier as a toaster-shaped device.
The accidental chip
There
would be no digital camera or no digital imaging of any kind without
the charged-coupled device, otherwise known as the CCD, that was
invented by a couple of Nobel prize winners completely by accident.
As
the story goes, Dr. George E. Smith wandered into the office of his
boss, Dr. Willard Boyle, at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, NJ, on Sept. 8,
1969, for their usual brainstorming session. Smith and Boyle convened
that warm but drizzly fall afternoon to talk about semiconductor
integrated circuits. Their boss asked them to examine if it was possible
to devise a form of bubble memory using semiconductors.
Smith
had been involved with an effort to create an electron beam imaging
tube for Bell's Picturephone, having a target consisting of an array of
silicon diodes. After jotting some notes on the blackboard, Smith
realized what they were devising could store data, but also could be an
image sensor.
The
CCD takes advantage of the solid state equivalent of the photoelectric
effect that won Albert Einstein his lone Nobel Prize in 1921. Amazingly,
it took the pair only an hour to sketch out what would become the first
digital imaging chip.
"[We]
knew we had something special," Boyle, who worked both on the laser and
helped choose landing sites for the Apollo mission, later understated.
"We are the ones who started this profusion of little cameras all over
the world."
Boyle died in 2011 at age 86.
The
CCD was announced early in 1970 and was quickly picked up by several
companies including RCA, which marketed the commercial TV chip Fairchild
that made an aerial camera for the U.S. Air Force, Texas Instruments,
and, of course, by Bell Labs for its Picturephone.
In
2009, Boyle and Smith were awarded the Nobel Prize for physics for
their invention of the CCD. But it took a gangly young fresh-faced Kodak
engineer to give the CCD its true purpose.
Part-time work
While
Boyle and Smith were creating the CCD, Steve Sasson — who later became
known as the inventor of the digital camera — was still in college. Soon
after earning his bachelor's and a master's degree in Electrical
Engineering from Renesselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in Troy, NY, in
1973, the 23-year-old Sasson joined nearby Kodak as an junior
electrical engineer working in an applied research laboratory in the
Apparatus Division.
While
capturing a digital image sparked Sasson's curiosity, he had a plethora
of projects on his plate. He noodled about this CDD imaging idea in his
spare time.
"I
started to look around how these things worked and read whatever I
could about them," Sasson told me eight years ago during an interview.
"Then I thought about how to capture images, then maybe building a
camera. It became really came clear to me that if I could digitize an
image, freeze it and hold it and analyze it and store it and look at it,
that was sort of the goal."
First,
he ordered a two 24-pin dual inline Fairchild type 201 100 x 100 pixel
CCDs for about $500. Inside the box were handwritten instructions that
described the dozen clock setting and matching voltage variables.
"Each
device would work only if each voltage was set at a certain value," he
told me. "These things were very experimental, and it only took one of
these voltages to be off and you wouldn't get any output. Then at the
bottom was written 'good luck.' I remember looking at this and saying,
'boy, I'm in trouble.'"
Getting
the CCD to work required a lot of trial and error: "There was a plan,
you do the plan and you think everything's right and there's no signal
coming out, so what do you do? In addition to getting all the clocking
signals generated, the output of the CCD is just little pulses of
voltage," Sasson said. "A volt for each pixel in the image is
represented by a short pulse of voltage that appears at the output
terminal. I had to build all the clocking in order to see these little
the pulses that represent the output of the charged coupled device when
it's working correctly to see if the device was operating properly."
"We
got to the point where we shined light on it, we knew that the pulses
of output voltage represented actual light that was being seen by the
device," he added. "We were very happy when that was working. But that
was only the beginning of the story."
Sasson
needed more than a chip, of course. He needed a lens, an optical
assembly and exposure control — all of which he eventually salvaged from
a Kodak XL55 movie camera.
Winter
turned to spring then to summer and then to fall again. Sasson worked
to integrate the CCD with a Motorola A-to-D converter and a dozen
4096-bit dynamic memory chips. He built and debugged the circuits, and
designed and constructed the digital circuitry from scratch. He also
toiled on the CCD timing, the playback timing, the data boards and the
power supply.
To store the captured images, Sasson used a 12-volt portable Memodyne Model No. 300 data cassette recorder.
When
it was finished, Sasson's prototype looked like something a kid would
have built with an Erector Set. It weighed eight-and-a-half pounds, ran
on 16 AA batteries, and, at 8.25 x 6 x 9 inches and was about the size
of a toaster.
"It's an odd-looking beast," Sasson chuckles. "Odd today and really odd in 1975."
The first picture
Without
a PC, all of Sasson's CCD experiments were measured on an oscilloscope.
Finally, in December 1975, he was ready to take an actual picture.
He
and his assistant asked lab technician Joy Marshall to pose for them.
"She knew us; the weird guys from the back lab. She didn't know what we
were doing, no one knew. So she said okay and I took a head and shoulder
shot."
With
a resolution of 100 x 100 pixels – .001 MP, it took 23 seconds to
record the black and white digital image to the cassette tape. But when
they connected their contraption to a lab TV set, the picture looked
weirder than the camera. Her hair looked right, while her face was just
static. Standing behind Sasson and his technician, Joy remarked "needs
work," and wandered off. It took Sasson a couple of hours, but he
discovered the problem.
"When
I designed the playback unit to read it off the tape, I somehow flipped
around the bits to read the most significant bits first instead the
least. Everything that was really white and really dark was correct, but
anything with greyscale was flipped. We switched some wires around,
waited the 23 seconds and up popped her image. I think we called [Joy]
back. She was happier."
Electronic? Digital?
Sasson's
part-time project was nowhere near ready for prime time. Once Sasson
proved the concept, the rest of Kodak started work to develop what was
clearly a breakthrough product. Kodak researcher Kenneth A. Parulski,
for instance, led the successful development of a color CCD.
But
Sasson and Kodak were beaten to the filmless camera market by Sony,
which marketed the Pro Mavica, the first commercial electronic still
camera, in 1981. But the Mavica was an analog electronic still camera
that used a proprietary two-inch floppy disc to store images. Several
other companies announced similar electronic still cameras, but these
cameras were either too expensive or their images of insufficient
resolution – often both – to crack the consumer market.
In
the mid-1980s, several camera makers introduced multi-thousand dollar
electronic still cameras for the professional market, including Canon
with its RC-701 and Nikon with its QC-1000C. In mid-1987, Sony unveiled a
consumer version of its Mavica, the MVC-C1 Hi Band VF Mavica, which was
an analog still camera, not digital, that stored images on two-inch
square discs. In September 1988, Fuji unveiled the DS-1P, the first
electronic still camera that recorded images digitally on a 16MB
internal memory card developed with Toshiba, but it was never sold in
the U.S.
None of these were true digital cameras.
In
the early 1980s, Kodak senior project engineer and the chief designer
of the company's professional cameras, James E. McGarvey, led a team at
Kodak that included Sasson to develop a megapixel digital camera. The
first prototype appeared in 1986 and the first commercial model, the
Kodak DCS (Digital Camera System) 100, a 1.3 megapixel CCD fit into a
Nikon film camera body, in 1991. The DSC 100 is often cited as the first
true commercially available digital camera, but it was sold only to
well-heeled photojournalists for $10,000 to $20,000, such as to
reporters covering the first Gulf War who were forced to lug around an
11-pound accessory pack.
Also
in 1991, Dycam launched the Dycam Model 1, a $995 palm-sized
all-digital camera that took black & white photos. Dycam licensed
the technology to Logitech, who sold the camera as the Fotoman the
following year. But the camera was aimed not at the consumer market but
to real estate agents, insurance companies and other businesses
requiring quick images.
Kodak
saw the consumer commercial possibilities of a film less digital camera
connected to a computer and began working with Apple to create the
QuickTake 100.
Epilogue
The
combination of Kodak and Apple has produced several paradoxical
ironies. The first was Kodak's attitude toward its invention. The
company was afraid the new invention would cannibalize its foundational
film business — and they were right. But instead of controlling the
cannibalization, Kodak allowed other manufacturers to steal its thunder.
Under the unrelenting pressure from everyone else capitalizing off the
popularity of its invention, Kodak declared bankruptcy in January 2012.
And
now we are seeing the demise of the digital camera as a standalone
product. Digital camera sales started to seriously slide three years ago
because of the quality of the camera found in smartphones, which
started when Apple introduced the iPhone. So, in the final irony, Apple
both initiated the digital camera revolution 20 years ago and helped end
it as well.
