The British magazine The Economist is presenting an Innovation Award to Steve Sasson, the man who developed the world's first digital still camera. That was in 1975.
Sasson did so as a researcher for Kodak, where he still works today, now in a management role. His camera used a cassette tape as its storage medium and had a resolution of 0.1 megapixels. The image was black and white , and capturing the first image took 23 seconds.
The Economist itself describes the Innovation Awards as the Oscars of Innovation. The presentation will take place on October 29.
Sasson's camera was not the first filmless still camera. That device was developed three years earlier by Texas Instruments, but it was analog. Sasson's 3.6-kilogram camera was fitted with the lens from a Kodak movie camera, a Motorola analog-to-digital converter, and a Fairchild Industries CCD from 1973.
