Back in December 2025, BBC featured A ‘toaster with a lens’: The story behind the first handheld digital camera:
In 1975, a young engineer in the company that made Kodak film took the first picture on a handheld digital camera. Photography would never be the same again.
In a short summary, the first digital camera was invented at Kodak by Steve Sasson. Not because Sasson was asked to do it, but because, as a new hire, his first assignment was to checkout these new CCD chips. The bulky black and white camera took 100×100 pixels picture stored onto a cassette tape, to view the tape was read back for the image to be displayed on a TV. And business people always so this as a shift in the business if it every took. But in 1975 this was definitely not ready for anything, It needed hundred times more pixel to match even Instamatic 110 — which was the smallest format, before Kodak Disc.
Kodak had the future in their hands, but didn’t know what to do. It’s not that they did nothing, but what advance they had, they lost it as the competition caught up. After producing the first DSLRs with Nikon and Canon, making a good number of point and shoot cameras, and creating with Olympus the Four-Third format, they lost to the market and filed for bankruptcy in 2012, at which point they sold of a lot of business divisions, including the sensors.
After having emerged from bankruptcy over a decade ago, Kodak remains one of the few film manufacturers left in the world, while a lot of Kodak branded products are just that: branded. Fortunately Kodak seems to want continuing making film in a market that has completely shrunk, and for which its main competitor, Fujifilm, mostly withdrew.
