Although digital photography seems to be a fairly recent invention, the truth is that digital photography has a long and varied history. The history of digital photography begins with the history of photography itself, for without these original pioneers, photography as we know it may have never existed. Some of the very first forms of photography captured images of the civil war in the early 19th century and the history of digital photography has been advancing ever since.

The Early History Of Digital Photography

The history of digital photography begins in the early 1950’s, with the birth of the first video tape recorders. This marked the first time that images could be coded and later decoded by specialized machinery. Until then, all images were either broadcasted live or imbedded in film for future extraction. Using this technology, inventors later created a camera that could be used in space with the images beamed back to earth for decoding. This was the birth of the first digital camera, occurring in the mid 1960’s.

In 1973, the technology for the digital camera was firmly anchored on Earth and was being worked on by inventors all over the world. An engineer working for Kodak produced a camera that could encode the image on a solid chip and could decode the image at a later date. At this point in the history of digital photography, the camera weighed more than 8 pounds and produced images with 0.1 megapixels. The next step in the history of digital photography was taken.

Recent History of Digital Photography

The next momentous event in the history of digital photography was the development of the first consumer digital camera. The first consumer digital camera released to the retail market was the Mavica, released by Sony in 1981. The camera recorded its images onto a floppy disk and each disk held up to 1.44 MB of pictures. The number of pictures that could be taken were limitless because each disk could be removed and replaced, and the pictures could be erased from the disk so newer pictures could be added. The modern digital camera was born.

Over the years, technological advances during the history of digital photography have created cameras that are smaller, more powerful, and more convenient for consumers. Photography has become much less time consuming and costs have been reduced dramatically. Over the history of digital photography, it has been a concept, a reality, a space mission, and has become a way of life. Makes you wonder what the future of digital photography will hold.