Kodak Built the First Digital Camera and Then Sat on It

Steve Sasson was a 24-year-old electrical engineer at Eastman Kodak in Rochester, working on a vague brief: see what could be done with a Fairchild charge-coupled device, a new kind of solid-state image sensor. By December 1975 he had bolted together a working prototype: lens scavenged from a Super 8 movie camera, the CCD, an A-to-D converter, a digital tape recorder, and a battery pack. It weighed about eight pounds. Resolution was 100 by 100 pixels — 0.01 megapixels. Capture took 23 seconds; playback to a TV screen, another 23.

He demonstrated it to Kodak management. The reaction, by Sasson's own later telling, was not hostility — it was indifference. The image quality was terrible, the storage medium was a cassette, and there was no obvious market. Kodak filed for the patents in 1977 and 1978, then declined to develop the technology into a product. The strategic concern was film: every digital camera sold was, eventually, a roll of Kodachrome that wouldn't be sold.

The company didn't ignore digital after that. Kodak shipped the first commercial DSLR, the DCS 100, in 1991, built around a Nikon F3 body. Through the 1990s and 2000s it earned billions in licensing revenue from the patents Sasson had filed. What it didn't do was reorganize itself around a film-free future. Other companies — Sony, Canon, Nikon — built the consumer digital market while Kodak protected its film franchise.

Kodak filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in January 2012. Sasson had retired from the company in 2009. The patent on his original camera had expired by then, and the technology was in every phone in everyone's pocket — the market Kodak had seen coming and chosen not to chase.