Steven Sasson
Born Jul 4 1950Electronic Still CameraDigital Camera
Patent No. 4,131,919
Inducted 2011
In 1974, Kodak supervisor Gareth Lloyd
asked electrical engineer Steve Sasson to investigate whether charge-coupled
devices could be used to create an image sensor for a camera. After a year in
the laboratory, Sasson created a device that captured an image, converted it to
an electronic signal, digitized the signal, and stored the image—the first
digital camera.
Invention Impact
An early adopter of digital imaging
technology was the newspaper industry. In 1994, Kodak developed one of the
first commercially-available digital cameras, the AP NC 2000, in cooperation
with the Associated Press and Nikon. The first consumer digital camera to
incorporate an LCD screen on the back was the Casio QV-10 in 1995, which
retailed for around $650 and had 2MB of memory.
Today, consumers can choose from a wide
array of cameras, from less than $100 to thousands of dollars. In 2008, 73% of
Americans owned a digital camera and 34 million digital cameras were sold in
the U.S., generating $7 billion in revenue. Virtually all of today’s digital
cameras rely on the same structure that Sasson invented in 1975.
Inventor Bio
Raised in Brooklyn, Sasson attended
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, receiving his B.S. and M.S. He joined Kodak
in 1973 and remains there today. Most recently, he works with Kodak’s
Intellectual Property Transactions group.
Source:
HALL OF FAME/inventor profile
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