My name is Steven Sasson, and I invented the digital camera.
To take a picture I would pick it up and, um, I would take the, uh, the camera, and
we had to build a switch right here. And it had two positions. The first one turned power
on to the camera, where all the electronics would turn on. And then the second one would
grab the picture. And then after the picture was grabbed it was read out in about 50 milliseconds
and digitized and stored in the digital memory card which was contained down here.
And so it was captured then. But it wasn't stored then. I needed a more permanent form
of storage. And so the only more permanent form of digital storage I had available
to me at the time was digital cassette.
It took about 23 seconds to record, and the tape would hold 30 images, a number I chose,
by the way, to be conveniently between 24 and 36. I didn't want to store just one or two
images on there because then they'd say, well that's not very useful. I didn't want to store
100 or 1,000 images on there because nobody knew how to deal with that concept.
See the key, I think, when you're putting across an idea is you have to understand the
culture you're dealing with first and foremost and put everything very much like the culture
is used to, and then put your idea — only the essential elements of your idea — out there
so that it doesn't get confused with things that might complicate the concept.
I took the first picture in December of 1975. I was asked many times how long this would
take before it affected consumer photography. I used Moore's Law and the assumption that
a consumer would be happy with two million pixels worth of an image. It might seem silly
now, but that seemed like a big number back then. And I came up with 15 to 20 years.
The options the average person has today for imaging is unlimited. You walk around with
your cell phone or your digital camera today, and the pictures are excellent. They're reliably
produced. You can share them. Instantly.
I like to say to inventors that, um, be aware that your invention is in an environment where
the rest of the world's inventing along with you. And so by the time the idea matures it'll
be in a totally different world. I think that was the case with the digital camera.
Sitting in the Pixel Chair. Ha ha.