The engineer walked into a Kodak conference room carrying a box about the size of a toaster, pointed it at the people around the table, and took their picture.
No print came out. “It only took 50 milliseconds to capture the image, but it took 23 seconds to record it to the tape,” Steven Sasson later told the New York Times. He popped out a cassette, an assistant fed it into a playback unit, and about 30 seconds after that a picture of the room appeared on a television screen. It was black and white, 100 pixels by 100.
Sasson had joined Eastman Kodak in Rochester in 1973. His assignment was small: find out whether a new kind of light sensor, the charge coupled device, had any practical use. By 1975 he had built a camera around one, using a lens from a secondhand Super 8 movie camera, a portable cassette recorder, 16 batteries and half a dozen circuit boards. It weighed about 3.6 kilograms, roughly eight pounds. It used no film and no paper.
He gave the demonstration again and again, to marketing, technical and business groups, and then up the chain to their bosses. “They were convinced that no one would ever want to look at their pictures on a television set,” Sasson said. As they saw it, prints had been around for over a hundred years. They were cheap, and nobody complained.
Kodak, meanwhile, made money at every step of a print’s life: the camera, the film, the flash cubes, the processing chemistry, the paper. When the executives asked how long before digital could compete, Sasson did the math with Moore’s Law and said 15 to 20 years. “When you’re talking to a bunch of corporate guys about 18 to 20 years in the future, when none of those guys will still be in the company, they don’t get too excited about it,” he said.
Management’s reaction, as he described it to the Times in 2008, came in two parts: “that’s cute” and “don’t tell anyone about it.” Kodak patented the camera in 1978. Sasson was not allowed to show it to anyone outside the company.
In 1989 he and a colleague built a digital single lens reflex camera with a 1.2 megapixel sensor and memory cards. Sasson was told the company could sell it but wouldn’t, because it would eat away at film sales. “Every digital camera that was sold took away from a film camera and we knew how much money we made on film,” Sasson said. “Of course, the problem is pretty soon you won’t be able to sell film.”
Eighteen years after the 1975 prototype, by the Times’ count, Kodak offered its first consumer digital cameras, inside his range. Meanwhile the 1978 patent, until it expired in the United States in 2007, helped Kodak earn billions from other camera makers. In 2008 its own chief technology officer told the Times: “It seems Kodak had developed antibodies against anything that might compete with film.”
On January 19, 2012, Eastman Kodak filed for Chapter 11. In the announcement, chief executive Antonio Perez said Chapter 11 gave the company its best chance to get value out of two critical parts of its technology. The first was its digital capture patents, “essential for a wide range of mobile and other consumer electronic devices that capture digital images,” which had brought in more than $3 billion in licensing since 2003.