A digital camera is a camera that captures photographs in digital memory. Most cameras produced today are digital, largely replacing those that capture images on photographic film. Digital cameras are now widely incorporated into mobile devices like smartphones with the same or more capabilities and features of dedicated cameras. While there are still dedicated digital cameras, many more cameras are now incorporated into mobile devices like smartphones. High-end, high-definition dedicated cameras are still commonly used by professionals and those who desire to take higher-quality photographs.
Digital and digital movie cameras share an optical system, typically using a lens with a variable diaphragm to focus light onto an image pickup device. The diaphragm and shutter admit a controlled amount of light to the image, just as with film but the image pickup device is electronic rather than chemical. However, unlike film cameras, digital cameras can display images on a screen immediately after being recorded, and store and delete images from memory. Many digital cameras can also record moving videos with sound. Some digital cameras can crop and stitch pictures and perform other elementary image editing.
History
The first semiconductor image sensor was the charge-coupled device (CCD), invented by Willard S. Boyle and George E. Smith at Bell Labs in 1969,[5] based on MOS capacitor technology.[6] The NMOS active-pixel sensor was later invented by Tsutomu Nakamura's team at Olympus in 1985,[7][8][9] which led to the development of the CMOS active-pixel sensor (CMOS sensor) by Eric Fossum's team at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 1993.[10][8]
In the 1960s, Eugene F. Lally of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory was thinking about how to use a mosaic photosensor to capture digital images. His idea was to take pictures of the planets and stars while travelling through space to give information about the astronauts' position.[11] As with Texas Instruments employee Willis Adcock's film-less camera (US patent 4,057,830) in 1972,[12] the technology had yet to catch up with the concept.
The Cromemco Cyclops was an all-digital camera introduced as a commercial product in 1975. Its design was published as a hobbyist construction project in the February 1975 issue of Popular Electronics magazine. It used a 32×32 metal-oxide-semiconductor (MOS) image sensor, which was a modified MOS dynamic RAM (DRAM) memory chip.[13]
Steven Sasson, an engineer at Eastman Kodak, invented and built a self-contained electronic camera that used a CCD image sensor in 1975.[14][15][16] Around the same time, Fujifilm began developing CCD technology in the 1970s.[17] Early uses were mainly military and scientific; followed by medical and news applications.[citation needed]
Nikon was interested in digital photography since the mid-1980s. In 1986, while presenting to Photokina, Nikon introduced an operational prototype of the first SLR-type electronic camera (Still Video Camera), manufactured by Panasonic.[18] The Nikon SVC was built around a sensor 2/3″ charge-coupled device of 300,000 pixels. Storage media, a magnetic floppy disk inside the camera allows recording 25 or 50 B&W images, depending on the definition.[19] In 1988, Nikon released the first commercial electronic single-lens reflex camera, the QV-1000C.[18]
At Photokina 1988, Fujifilm introduced the FUJIX DS-1P, the first fully digital camera, capable of saving data to a semiconductor memory card. The camera's memory card had a capacity of 2 MB of SRAM (static random-access memory), and could hold up to ten photographs. In 1989, Fujifilm released the FUJIX DS-X, the first fully digital camera to be commercially released.[17] In 1996, Toshiba's 40 MB flash memory card was adopted for several digital cameras.[20]
The first commercial camera phone was the Kyocera Visual Phone VP-210, released in Japan in May 1999.[21] It was called a "mobile videophone" at the time,[22] and had a 110,000-pixel front-facing camera.[21] It stored up to 20 JPEG digital images, which could be sent over e-mail, or the phone could send up to two images per second over Japan's Personal Handy-phone System (PHS) cellular network.[21] The Samsung SCH-V200, released in South Korea in June 2000, was also one of the first phones with a built-in camera. It had a TFT liquid-crystal display (LCD) and stored up to 20 digital photos at 350,000-pixel resolution. However, it could not send the resulting image over the telephone function, but required a computer connection to access photos.[23] The first mass-market camera phone was the J-SH04, a Sharp J-Phone model sold in Japan in November 2000.[24][23] It could instantly transmit pictures via cell phone telecommunication.[25] By the mid-2000s, higher-end cell phones had an integrated digital camera. By the beginning of the 2010s, almost all smartphones had an integrated digital camera.
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