The History of the Digital Camera

  The first converter of an optical image into an electrical signal (and vice versa) was a simple electromechanical device, which was proposed in 1884 by the German engineer Paul Nipkov. Decomposition of the image into elements (pixels) was carried out by a disk with holes arranged in the radial direction in such a way that in one revolution each hole read out its own fragment of the image, passing only one pixel to the photodetector at a time. Subsequently, such a disc was called the Nipkov disc. The device used the simplest photodetector - a photoresistor. The images could be observed through the same disk, illuminated by an incandescent lamp, through which an amplified electrical signal from a photoresistor was passed. Nowadays, the Nipkow disk is used in ultra-high-resolution confocal microscopy and high-speed photography.

   The electronic television system (with electronic scanning of images) was patented in 1907 by the Russian physicist Boris Rosing, which made it possible already in 1911 to transmit a television image using this system.

   The idea of electronic television was taken up by Rosing's student, Vladimir Zvorykin, whom fate abandoned in the United States during the Russian Civil War. This was favored by the acquaintance with David Sarnov, who, even before the revolution of 1917 at a young age, left Russia with his parents and who was destined to become in 1930 the president of the world's largest company for the production of electronic equipment - RCA, and before that, in 1926 - one of the founders of NBC, first a broadcasting company and then the first television company in the United States. In 1931 Zvorykin created a television receiving tube - a kinescope, and in 1934 - a transmitting tube - an iconoscope. The light-sensitive target of the iconoscope had a mosaic structure, in which a silver droplet, sensitized with cesium, and located on the surface of a thin dielectric plate served as a pixel. Such a droplet, together with a solid silver coating on the opposite side of the plate, created a photosensitive capacitor, the photoelectric charge from which was read out by an electron beam.

  In 1961, the American scientist Eugene Lolly described the design of a mosaic image sensor for astronavigation. The photosensitive element of the sensor was a semiconductor coordinate photodetector with a transverse photoelectric effect. Lolly proposed converting the analog output signals of mosaic sensors into digital photographs of space objects and using these images to control interplanetary flights. Lolly's concept was subsequently used by the American and European space agencies.

  In 1963, a researcher at the American company Fairchild Imaging, Frank Wenles, proposed CMOS technology for manufacturing logic circuits, which, due to the absence of electricity consumption in a static mode, quickly began to replace bipolar technology and in the 80s of the last century became the main technology for manufacturing integrated circuits.

  The idea of a digital camera was proposed in 1969 by Willard Boyle and George Smith, researchers of the American company Bell Labs. To register images, they used a charge-coupled device (CCD) invented by them, which looked like a line of memory elements, into which electrical information charges can be introduced, and then read them by sequential movement of charges along the line. The accumulation of photovoltaic charges in a line of seven MOS cells was demonstrated by these researchers in 1970, which paved the way for the development of a scanner and a digital camera. For the invention of the CCD, Boyle and Smith were awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics.

  In 1973, the American company Fairchild began commercial production of black-and-white CCDs with 100 × 100 elements. In 1976, the same company released the first industrial digital camera, which was connected to a computer and used to control the production process.

  The first color video camera based on a CCD matrix was released in 1980 by the Japanese company Sony. In 1981, the same company launched the first color electronic camera with a resolution of 0.28 megapixels - a "static" video camera that shot in frame-by-frame mode and recorded data in analog NTSC format on a two-inch magnetic disk. The resolution of 525 lines was sufficient for viewing images on a monitor screen, but was too low for printing photographs.

   In 1982, Sony released the first camcorders - camcorders with video recording on video cassette (magnetic tape).     The first fully digital camera was created in 1988 by the Japanese company Fuji; its mass production began in 1990 by Sony.

  The difference between a digital camera and a digital video camera is minimal and lies in the plane of electronics, therefore they are often called the general term "digital camera".