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Interview- Steven Sasson, inventor of the prototype digital camera

Have you ever wondered where the digital camera came from? A man called Steven Sasson invented it, and after meeting him for just one minute it is impossible to not be in awe of his presence. Besides being charming, polite and modest, he invented something that changed the consumer photography market forever. Under Eastman Kodak in 1975 Steven Sasson created the first prototype digital camera, and in a DCE news feature special he tells us his story.

Steven was born in Brooklyn, New York and as a young boy he would drag television sets home to dismantle them in the living room for spare parts. “I had a very strange childhood,” he chuckles, “but it was tremendous fun.” In 1973, Steven graduated from Renesselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) with a Masters and went straight to work under Eastman Kodak. “I wasn’t really sure why,” Steven explains, “as Kodak were traditionally a chemical company. However, more electronic parts were going into cameras in the Seventies, such as electronic flashes, and this was something I was interested in.”

Very early on in his employment, Steven was offered the opportunity to work with charged couple devices, which began with a 30-second conversation in the back lab with his supervisor Gareth Lloyd. It was an open-ended project, and the criteria was to do something with CCD technology. There was no budget and it was completely under the radar. With his young and creative imagination, Steven got to work on an invention that would change the entire photography market. In a relaxed manner, Steven informs us of how it came to fruition: “Being young and foolish, I thought it would be really cool to build a portable camera with this thing with no moving parts. That would be so neat. I had no idea how to do any of this.”

For some months, Steven worked on this project – but what were Kodak’s thoughts about what he was were doing? “Nobody really knew what I was doing!” he answered, admitting that he didn’t want to let people know just in case it didn’t work. However, the further along the design progressed, the more exciting it got. “It turns out I could use a lot of the technology that was around,” he explains. “I leveraged parts that were around and I leveraged knowledge from the people that were very knowledgeable about different aspects of technology.”

After one year on the project, the camera was built. With his lab partner Jim Schueckler, Steven decided to take the first photograph.“One day Jim and I literally looked at each other and said, ‘you know, I think we’ve got both pieces working – we should take a picture of something’ and that was the first time it occurred to us that we should take a picture.”

Using a woman in the laboratory, Joy Marshall, as the subject matter, the duo took the first image. It took 23 seconds to record and had a resolution of 0.01MP. Steven explains “I was just unbelievably happy. I said to Jim, ‘so much is working, this is fantastic’. Joy, who’d followed us in and was looking over our shoulders, was less impressed. She said, ‘needs work’, turned around and walked out.” However, Steven knew what the problem was and with a few changes and an hour later, the camera was working. But what did he think at that moment? “I was very happy with it. It was a very private moment in the sense that nobody knew we were working on it. I was closing on a house that day and I remember thinking it was a red-letter day. I thought ‘my camera works and I’m going to get a new house!’ – I was very happy with that day. It was December 12, 1975.”

For some time after Steven would demonstrate his camera to employers in Kodak, working his way up the ladder in the hierarchy system. He would undertake the same demonstration every time by literally not saying a word when he entered the room, just taking a portrait of any person. He informs us, “I wasn’t trying to be dramatic, I was just trying to get the camera to take pictures before it stopped working. We were taking pictures without film, we were displaying images without printing – it was 1976.”

This rather novel demonstration prompted a lot questions among the workers at Kodak; anything from who he was to why anyone would want to look at a photo on a television set. Steven shrugs. “I didn’t have answers to any of these questions. I expected them to ask me how I invented the camera. They asked me these galactic questions!”

One thing Steven always believed in was the concept of his invention. When he was asked when the camera would be ready for production, he correctly guessed a timescale of 15-20 years. As predicted, 18 years later Kodak introduced its first digital camera. Steven claims his guess was complete luck, however as modest as he is about it now, his intuition told him that it was still a generation away. When writing a compulsory lab report, Steven informs us “I had a chance to ponder the future towards the end of 1976 as the project was over. I wrote in the report, ‘camera of the future’. It was a paragraph. To read it now you get a few shivers, as a lot of things that I wrote about happened.” He continues, “The first line of the report read – ‘this approach, with improvements in technology, could substantially impact the way people take photos in the future.’” He was not wrong.

In the Eighties, another major camera company, Sony, came up with its filmless invention. However, this camera involved a process using floppy disks. Steven was thrilled that Kodak now had some competition – as he informs us, it definitely made Kodak management wake up and take notice. However Kodak was already ahead of the game, and through mathematical equations Steven worked out that Sony’s invention was not going to become a mass consumer product. Steven states, “Kodak knew it wasn’t going to evolve around the TV set (as Sony’s invention did) but around the evolving computer, which had no format limitations. It was a long pathway away, but we knew the future.”

In 1994, Kodak under Apple Mac marketed the first consumer digital camera. When asked why did Kodak not produce the camera under its own name, Steven replied, “Kodak was wary to market this camera. The marketing issues we faced with this camera as a consumer product were highly challenging.”

There was no public discussion on Steven’s invention until 2001. When he received recognition for his achievements, luckily for us he had kept the camera. When asked where the camera is today, he informs us, “In Rochester. Now it is quite a showpiece, I’m not even allowed to take it around. For 30 years no one was really too concerned with it. I used to keep it in cabinets as I moved from job to job. I lost it several times.”

We talk further about the future of digital camera technology and the challenges facing designers and companies. Steven’s views are realistic and intriguing to hear. “We take more pictures than ever,” he comments. “Think about the use of things, our cameras today are marvellous. Now they’re 10/12 megapixels. I was happy with them when they were two! The taking part has been addressed, but how about the display sharing.” He refers to the process of downloading and printing an image as the ‘chain of pain’. “That's why we invented Kodak Easyshare – we now have electronic shoeboxes.”

We move on to talk about the future of the cameraphone. Steven states “I don’t envy the designers at all,” and then goes on to tell us about all the problems designers face with lenses, processing power and flash power problems. Referring to the timescale in which we will see all of these changes, Steven states, “It will be slower than you may think. There’s a long way to go before you get all of this into this.” (Steven points at his Kodak camera, then his phone.) He continues, “This is the most exciting time in the world to be alive for imaging. There is so much that you have available to capture and describe your own life in what I call the universal language. There is a lot to happen, there is a lot of challenges we know and are working on right now and a lot of opportunity over the next couple of decades.”

Steven retired from Kodak last February after working for the company for over 35 years. However, he still does some contract consulting, as well as helping with patent litigation activities. Steven Sasson has undeniably changed the entire photography market and he was recognised for his achievements at this year’s Economist's Innovation Awards 2009, winning under the Consumer Products category. Steven states, “Inventors spend most of their time being wrong.” Fortunately however, on this occasion, he got it right.

To hear our interview with Steven, click here.

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