1. The Incredible Transformation of the Digital SLR

It was the snapshot heard ‘round the world. Eventually.

In late 1975, few people were aware that the planet’s first digital camera had been successfully tested—even within Eastman Kodak Company, where Kodak engineer Steven Sasson spent the better part of a year developing an 8 pound prototype that was the size of a small toaster (see Figure 1.1). The first photograph taken by this first digital camera in December 1975, was in black-and-white and contained only 10,000 pixels—one hundredth of a megapixel. Each image took 23 seconds to record, and a similar amount of time to pop up for review on a television screen. But the age of digital photography had begun.