A 'toaster with a lens': The story behind the first handheld digital camera
13 comments
·December 8, 2025Sharlin
A very similar PetaPixel article with a couple more technical details: [1] In particular, it describes the reason for the first corrupted image – they had wired the four-bit output in the wrong order so that the high bit was the lowest and vice versa. Thus, all-ones still looked white and all-zeros black, but the rest of the shades were scrambled.
[1] https://petapixel.com/how-steve-sasson-invented-the-digital-...
ChrisMarshallNY
Kodak should have ruled the digital imaging space. Instead, they collapsed.
A lot of it was because the film people kneecapped the digital folks.
Film was very profitable.
Until it wasn't.
The company that I worked for, was a classic film company. When digital was first getting a foothold (early 1990s), I used to get lectures about how film would never die...etc.
A few years later, it was as if film never existed. The transition was so sudden, and so complete, that, if you blinked, you missed it.
Years later, I saw the same kind of thing happen to my company, that happened to Kodak.
The iPhone came out, with its embedded camera, and that basically killed the discrete point-and-shoot market, which was very profitable for my company.
When the iPhone first came out, the marketing folks at my company laughed at it.
Then, they stopped laughing.
contrarian1234
Amazing, a whole article about a camera without a single photo from that camera
Sharlin
I wonder if any exist on the internet and if the camera is still functional.
Edit: it's very likely that no photos exist because the tapes were being reused and there are many reasons why the camera has been nonfunctional for a long time now.
ginko
Yeah, the camera probably hasn't been in functioning condition for decades and people at Kodak likely didn't see much historical value in archiving those tapes.
pnut
I don't doubt this description of what happened, but the sad irony in a company whose product was producing tools to generate archival copies of images, not recognising the value of retaining archival copies of images... facepalm.
user28712094
engineers were probably screaming about digital. middle management (who are the only ones irreplaceable by ai btw) probably called it a fad
DeathArrow
Kodak invented the thing that killed them.
nvmind2
I worked for a company that was beautifully run with great, smart, hardworking people, led by someone that had been with the technology since the beginning. We almost immediately got acquired by a public company that used different technology that saw us as a threat, and the founders were retained long enough to see their company and workers basically trashed into a mediocre state.
This is a very common story from what I understand, whether the intent is either “if you can’t beat them, buy them!” or even if it’s just to grow.
In Kodak’s case, I wonder if both those that saw it as the future and those that saw it as the end wanted to support and control it.
Also, it never ceases to amaze that some of the best things and the most dangerous things are (1) not those that you planned on and (2) involve someone bending and breaking rules to persue a passion project.
phire
I mean, it was one of those inevitable technologies.
Other companies had already invented the CCD, it was only a matter of time before someone would digitise the signal and pair it with a storage device. It was an obvious concept.
All Kodak really did was develop an obvious concept into a prototype many years before it could be viable, and then receive a patent for it.
stavros
> "It's really not a very fair statement to say that they missed the digital photography that they actually had invented," he says.
HardwareLust
Cool story!
Sometimes I think a lot of myself. Sometimes I don't. During the times I do, I console myself about my lack of success by thinking that I have never been in the right place at the right time.
But had I been in that place at that time, I would not have invented the digital camera. That guy Sasson was clearly capable far beyond the rest of us.