Weighing in at 4 kilograms and standing a proud 22 centimetres tall, this is the world's first portable digital camera. In 1975, Steve Sasson and his team at Kodak's Elmgrove plant in Rochester, New York, cobbled it together from existing Kodak parts and other state-of-the-art technology.
Their heady mix included a lens from a Super 8 camera, the early home-movie camera recently popularised in a J. J. Abrams movie of the same name; what was then a new charge-coupled device (CCD) for converting light into digital signals; a digital cassette recorder; and 16 nickel-cadmium batteries. The resulting images were black and white and had a resolution of 10,000 pixels - a mere 0.01 megapixels in today's parlance.
Actually viewing them was a lot more work, and required heftier equipment. It took 23 seconds for the CCD to record to the cassette. The cassette then had to be removed and placed in a chunky custom-made device that sent the image to a TV set.
The system was truly ahead of its time. When Sasson showed it off to colleagues at Kodak, he was asked: "Why would you want to look at photos on a TV?" But Sasson revealed he was aware of its potential in a 1977 technical report: "The camera described in this report represents a first attempt demonstrating a photographic system which may, with improvements in technology, substantially impact the way pictures will be taken in the future."
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