A Long Way from Cassette Tapes and Twenty-Three Second Exposures

This is an oldie but goodie about the world’s first digital camera by Kodak and Steve Sasson:

Here are some specs: The 8 pound camera recorded 0.01 megapixel black and white photos to a cassette tape. The first photograph took 23 seconds to create. To play back images, data was read from the tape and then displayed on a television set. We’re sure come a long way since then, eh?

Sure, we have.

Twenty three seconds is a long time to make a photograph. I wonder how much of that is due to gathering enough light to make an acceptable exposure versus the amount of time it takes to process the light into 10,000 pixels (0.01 megapixels) then into digital bits.

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