Long before digital cameras filled shop shelves, a junior Kodak engineer built a crude, boxy device in 1975 that quietly set in motion one of photography’s biggest revolutions.
The handheld digital camera can trace its origins to 1975, when a young electrical engineer at Eastman Kodak assembled a prototype that would alter the course of photography, BBC reported.
Steve Sasson, then just 23, had joined a company renowned for its dominance in film and chemical processing. But unlike Kodak’s chemists and mechanical engineers, Sasson was drawn to electronics and the emerging potential of integrated circuits.
Kodak asked him to examine a new device known as a charge-coupled device (CCD), an early light-sensitive chip. Sasson realised it could underpin a camera that needed no film at all. Working largely with scavenged parts, he attached a lens from a discarded movie camera to the CCD, used a digital converter from a cheap voltmeter and connected the system to an audio cassette deck to store data.
By late 1975, he and colleague Jim Schueckler had built a portable, 3.6kg contraption that captured black-and-white images at 100 x 100 pixels. The first photograph, taken of a colleague, appeared distorted on a TV monitor after 23 seconds of playback, but the team recognised its significance. “We were just overjoyed,” Sasson later recalled.
Kodak’s management quickly understood the concept’s disruptive potential, raising commercial questions that outpaced the technology of the day: whether colour was feasible, how resolution might improve and when consumers might embrace filmless photography. Sasson estimated it would take 15–20 years for digital images to rival basic film, an assessment proved largely accurate when Kodak released its first consumer digital camera in 1995.
Sasson’s prototype, now housed at the George Eastman Museum, foreshadowed the digital imaging boom driven by personal computing and the internet. Its legacy lives on in the cameras now embedded in billions of smartphones worldwide.
