After inventing first digicam, Kodak still recovering from late-entry to market
Hindsight is 20/20, which is why it's so easy to claim that Kodak, inventors of the first digital camera (a 0.1 megapixel beast that makes your cameraphone look like a Hasselblad), made a huge blunder in its meandering transition from film to digital. In Thursday's USA Today that camera's inventor, Steven Sasson, reveals its humble beginnings as well as the reason Kodak waited to make its play in digital. Sasson jury-rigged his 8-pound monster in 1975 from a variety of off-the-shelf components including Fairchild Semiconducter's new CCD chips. The first pic he shot took 23 seconds to register on cassette and another 23 to output to a television monitor. Negative feedback he got from his superiors on the cumbersome setup and poor-image quality kept Kodak from releasing a consumer digital camera until 2001, although their research did much to help Japanese manufacturers take an early lead with their own models. Since then, Kodak has managed to catapult to number one in U.S. digicam sales, although 100,000 employees have lost their jobs since 1988 as a result of film's decline.
Update: You all were right and the USA Today/Engadget collaborative was wrong. Kodak released their first consumer digital camera, the DC40, in 1995, and not 2001 as the post claims.
