Final Project Brief Kodak
Final Project Brief Kodak
Final Project Brief Kodak
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Assessment Brief and Guidance:
From theoretical beginnings as a space-travel navigation aid, the digital camera developed from tapeless
analogue cameras through sky-charting behemoths to consumer concepts and beyond. To explore that long
history, we've charted the milestones, the groundbreakers -- and the downright strange. Take a look to see
where your camera came from, as we visit Grandad Kodak, Uncle Apple and a whole family tree of camera
cousins.
The beginnings
The history of the digital camera began with Eugene F. Lally of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. When he
wasn't coming up with ways to create artificial gravity he was thinking about how to use a mosaic photo
sensor to capture digital images. His 1961 idea was to take pictures of the planets and stars while travelling
through space, in order to help establish the astronauts' position. Unfortunately, as with Texas Instrument
employee Willis Adcock's filmless camera (US patent 4,057,830) in 1972, the technology had yet to catch
up with the concept.
The camera generally recognised as the first digital still snapper was a prototype (US patent 4,131,919)
developed by Eastman Kodak engineer Steven Sasson in 1975. He cobbled together some Motorola parts
with a Kodak movie-camera lens and some newly invented Fairchild CCD electronic sensors.
The resulting camera, pictured above on its first trip to Europe recently, was the size of a large toaster and
weighed nearly 4kg. Black-and-white images were captured on a digital cassette tape, and viewing them
required Sasson and his colleagues to also develop a special screen.
The resolution was a revolutionary .01 megapixels and it took 23 seconds to record the first digital
photograph. Talk about shutter lag.
Some believe that Kodak missed a trick by not developing this technological breakthrough, with film
remaining their bread and butter. The next step in the process would come from elsewhere.
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Figure 2 SONY’s Magnetic Video Camera
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followed it with the RC-250 Xapshot, the first consumer analogue camera, in 1988.
The Xapshot was called the Ion in Europe, and the Q-PIC in Japan. It cost $499 in the US, but consumers
had to splash out a further $999 on a battery, computer interface card with software, and floppy disks.
Think about that the next time you get annoyed when you have to pay extra for memory cards.
Figure 4 Photo of auroras taken by All-Sky camera
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Figure 5 shows the HOMIC (Horizontal Memorychip Integral storobo Camera). This was a Gerry
Anderson-esque concept for a still video camera recording to solid-state memory. Unusually, the lens and
viewfinder were on the same axis, while the flash fired through the objective lens.
The HOMIC was exhibited at the 1984 Photokina, but was never marketed.
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Digital comes to SLR
Digital backs were attached to film cameras in some SLR systems. An example of this is the Hasselblad
DB 4000 with a Leaf back (figure 7), which arrived in 1991. It packed a 2,048x2,048-pixel CCD and 8-bit
storage.
Adobe PhotoShop 1.0 hit the shops in 1990.
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Apple gets in on the action: the QuickTake
You'd have to live under a rock to not know that Apple makes phones these days, but did you know it also
had a crack at the digital camera market? The Apple QuickTake 100 (figure 9 top), launched in 1994, was
actually manufactured by Kodak, and was the the first colour digital camera for under $1,000. It packed a
640x480-pixel CCD and could stash up to eight 640x480 images in the internal memory.
The QuickTake 200 (figure 9, pictured below) followed later, and was built by Fujifilm.
Figure 10 The OLYMPUS’s Deltis VC-1100 (left) and KODAK’s DC-25 (right)
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camera with built-in transmission capabilities. With a modem connected, photos could be transmitted over
phone lines -- even mobiles -- although it took about six minutes to transmit high-quality images. Image
resolution was 768x576 pixels, the shutter speed could be set between 1/8 and 1/1000 second, and it
included a colour LCD viewfinder.
SmartMedia card and CompactFlash cards also arrived that year. The first camera to use CompactFlash was
the Kodak DC-25 (figure 10, pictured right) in 1996.
In 1995, the first digital camera to shoot both still photos and movie footage with sound appeared. The
Ricoh RDC-1 included a removable 64mm (2.5-inch) colour LCD screen. The CCD packed a 768x480-
pixel resolution, while the zoom clocked in at 3x and f/2.8. More than a decade later and those are still the
baseline specs for compacts (apart from the resolution, of course).
The RDC-1 would have set you back a hefty $1,500.
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Webcams and compacts
In 1995, Logitech debuted the VideoMan, its first webcam, and the first colour digital video camera for the
personal computer.
The now-familiar compact shape continued to emerge with the Canon PowerShot 600 (pictured) in 1996. It
had a 1/3-inch, 832x608-pixel CCD, built-in flash, auto white balance and an optical viewfinder as well as
an LCD display. It was the first consumer digital camera able to write images to a hard disk drive, and
could store up to 176MB. It cost $949.
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pictures. This embeds location information in the image file so that Google Earth, which the camera links
directly to, or sites such as Flickr, can show where the image was taken on a map.
Of course, 39 megapixels is pretty ludicrous, and so is the £18,500 price tag. Hasselblad has taken this into
account by offering two lesser versions of the H3D II, available to us lesser mortals that don't need to shoot
photos the size of billboards. Well, kind of: they offer 22- and 31-megapixel sensors. We may need to save
up.
How far we've come.
Source:
1. Richard Trenholm (2007), Photos: The history of the digital camera,
https://www.cnet.com/news/photos-the-history-of-the-digital-camera/
2. Richard Trenholm (2007), Hasselblad H3D II: Megapixel madness,
https://www.cnet.com/news/hasselblad-h3d-ii-megapixel-madness/
Questions:
1: The history of technological change in camera industry is bound with initial radical breakthroughs
(inventions with patents) followed by incremental improvements (innovations). Highlight the
inventions and innovations that bring the new product in this industry. Determine the difference
between (1) inventions of technological breakthroughs and (2) major innovations and (3)
minor/incremental innovations.
2: Analyze the competition among various digital cameras (product innovation) in their product-
line:
Build the S-cure for the evolution of digital camera and film camera.
How was the performance of digital camera improved over time?
When film cameras were, at first, challenged by the first commercial filmless digital camera
(SONY’s MAVICA), describe the rival technology (technology of MAVICA) at time T1 in
the S-curve? How was the performance of the MAVICA by the time T1 when it, at first,
entered the market?
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3: Analyse the case of first prototype digital camera, developed by Kodak's Steven Sasson:
Explain how Kodak’s organisational vision, leadership, culture shaped the company
innovations and commercialisations toward digital camera.
Why Kodak missed a trick by not developing this technological breakthrough?
Note: student could enrich evident and data for their analysis by searching on the internet, do
remember to cite the source of information.
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