Before Digital Ruled Us All

A month ago I wrote a bit about how long it was taking to send photos back from Pluto. Today, The New York Times’ James Estrin looks at the work of Steve Sasson, the man who invented digital photography at Kodak some 42 years ago.

How are these related? Read on …

Mr. Sasson made a series of demonstrations to groups of executives from the marketing, technical and business departments and then to their bosses and to their bosses. He brought the portable camera into conference rooms and demonstrated the system by taking a photo of people in the room.

“It only took 50 milliseconds to capture the image, but it took 23 seconds to record it to the tape,” Mr. Sasson said. “I’d pop the cassette tape out, hand it to my assistant and he put it in our playback unit. About 30 seconds later, up popped the 100 pixel by 100 pixel black and white image.”

How long is that? Well, the delay between pressing the shutter on a modern camera and it making an image is less than that time. And it’s going to collect a lot more than 10,000 pixels …