Talk:Steven Sasson

Inventor status

Tkelly7, I'm sorry, but you are going to have to do better (a lot better) than "my father-in-law never heard of him" as a source. Since Sasson holds the fundamental patent, which was assigned to his employer Kodak, and was featured in numerous articles celebrating the 30th anniversary of the invention of the digital camera, I think he qualifies as the inventor, or at the very least co-inventor with his co-patent holder, Gareth Lloyd. I have reverted your change.David 04:04, 8 May 2006 (UTC)

This BBC article (published a few days ago) shows a picture of Michael Francis Tompsett with a camera it describes as "the world's first digital colour camera", and shows a picture taken by the camera in 1972 that appeared on the cover of Electronics. If that is the case, then how did Sasson invent the first digital camera three years later? (There was also apparently some earlier work on digital photography for satellites.) —BarrelProof (talk) 16:02, 6 February 2017 (UTC)

There were actually lots of steps in inventing the digital camera. I'm pretty sure Tompsett's camera was an analog TV camera using a CCD imager; it would be interesting to see that old Electronics mag article and see what it says. By the way, I learned about CCD imagers from the 1975 book by Tompsett and Sequin, and from Sequin personally, around 1977, and made my own digital imaging system of sorts in 1980 (not for photography though). And got a bunch of digital camera related patents in the 2000s. Dicklyon (talk) 16:27, 6 February 2017 (UTC)

Spy satellites used to drop film canisters. At some point they started sending back images (scanned from film developed on board iirc). But sending back digital images from spacecraft had been done as early as 1969, I think, with spacecraft to the Moon and Mars. I'll have to check the dates. But those were analog TV camera tubes with digitizers, not much like what Sasson did. Dicklyon (talk) 16:27, 6 February 2017 (UTC)

I found a GBS snippet that says "Solid State Devices 1973, - Page 104 https://books.google.com/books?id=L0YsAAAAYAAJ European Physical Society - 1974 - ‎Snippet view - ‎More editions / Three of these devices have recently been utilized to build a colour ccd camera (M F Tompsett and E J Zimany, private communication). The light is ... The colour version can be seen on the cover of the January 18, 1973 issue of Electronics." So it's a Three-CCD camera; not clear whether video, but I'm pretty sure that's what they were doing, and didn't get to a prototype with TV resolution until 1975. Dicklyon (talk) 16:42, 6 February 2017 (UTC)

Yes, definitely video; this article, "Charge-coupling improves its image, challenging video camera tubes" MF Tompsett, WJ Bertram, DA Sealer, and CH Sequin, Electronics, vol. 46, no. 2, pp. 162-163, 1973. Dicklyon (talk) 16:49, 6 February 2017 (UTC)

From a functional perspective, perhaps what was new about Sasson's camera was that it was a self-contained hand-held device (aside perhaps from a power cord, although I'm not sure whether it had one or not) that roughly meets the consumer expectation of what a camera looks like and how one is used. That's not necessarily what makes it an invention (e.g., in the sense of patentability, and his patent seems to focus on aspects that are not fundamental to the concept of a digital camera). I think the definition of a digital camera is a system that can capture an image and store it as an array of discretized (i.e., digital) values that can then be read out from the system (without using film as an intermediary stage, but possibly including some analog and even non-solid-state elements at the front end). It doesn't sound like Sasson's device was necessarily the first to meet that definition. Note that every claim of Sasson's patent starts with the phrase "In an electronic still camera", so it clearly acknowledges the prior existence of an electronic still camera. —BarrelProof (talk) 18:29, 6 February 2017 (UTC)

That 1977 patent filing is about buffering a fast image readout for slow writing onto storage such as mag tape. If he showed a camera to the public in 1975, it can't be that. But I do agree that his thing was more about self-contained with storage, which prior video cameras did not have. The NYT article says he wasn't allowed to show it outside, so the dates are OK for that first device. Dicklyon (talk) 22:00, 6 February 2017 (UTC)

By the way, where he says "electronic still camera" in the claims doesn't imply that's a known term of art, just that he defines it in the spec. Searching books, I'd say the term was pretty much nonexistent, or a prediction of something that might happen, or sometimes as a description of a film camera with electronic control. Dicklyon (talk) 22:31, 6 February 2017 (UTC)

A link to the Cromemco Cyclops article was recently added to this article. It is also hard to reconcile the content of that article with this one. That was a commercial digital camera product designed and tested in 1974 and put on the market in 1975, and a prominent article about it was published in February 1975 in Popular Electronics. That was all before Sasson's patent's priority date. The Cyclops is a more compact and more professional-appearing device than Sasson's, although it did have lower image resolution. —BarrelProof (talk) 20:25, 6 February 2018 (UTC)

As I mentioned above, what Sasson invented was the digital image buffer: quickly digitizing a video frame into a digital buffer, so that it could be stored (to tape in his case) at a more leisurely rate. This is pretty much exactly the step that was needed to enable the class of electronic cameras used for still photography, to this day; although as I also noted the Mariner probes to Mars had done something like that already in about 1965, with on-board digitization of pixels to 6 bits (see Digital_photography#cite_note-3). The Cromemco device was a cool toy, but was not really a step on the way to anything useful. Dicklyon (talk) 05:02, 28 May 2018 (UTC)

In particular, the Sasson patent is well distinguished from what Cromemco did in some claim elements such as "means responsive to said separated electrical signal for producing a plurality of multi-bit words indicative of said separated electrical signal, said digital words being produced in real time". The Cromemco device did not have a way to produce a stream of multi-bit words, except through slow software processing of multiple 1-bit images; not "in real time" in the sense that the Sasson patent defines. I'll see if I can tell whether the claims distinguish over what Mariner did. Perhaps Mariner recorded on analog tape, and digitized only on transmission? I suspect so, but don't know. Dicklyon (talk) 05:13, 28 May 2018 (UTC)

OK, found out what Mariner did, according to this paper (pdf). It was slow-scan vidicon with digital tape storage, in Mariner spacecraft from 1965 through 1971. I think this means the vidicon was shuttered, and used analog storage in the vidicon tube as the "buffer" to convert fast snaps to slow data. That is, the buffering was analog, not digital. So Sasson's technique was novel over this. Basically, until there were DRAM chips, his idea could not have been done. If others had the same idea earlier, the patent office didn't find evidence of it. Dicklyon (talk) 06:06, 28 May 2018 (UTC)

I just ran across this interesting history article. It says that it was written with help from Sasson, but acknowledges that it is not definitive, since it was written without full access to IEEE and SPIE publications and says it doesn't try to cover scanner cameras and scientific use of CCDs. It credits Sasson as "inventor of the world's first hand-held CCD digital camera". Note that this includes two distinct things that narrow the scope of "digital camera" in that characterization: being hand-held and using a CCD sensor. It credits Tompsett for the idea of using a CCD as an imaging sensor. About Sasson's camera, it says "This was not the first digital (all solid-state electronics) camera ever built. It was the first portable one though." It says that Sasson's camera used batteries, which means it really was fully self-contained and portable. That article also discusses another camera made by David Lewis of Kodak before Sasson that is apparently not well known. It does not seem to discuss the Cyclops. —BarrelProof (talk) 20:20, 1 June 2018 (UTC)

Here is a pretty good survey of digital camera history. Again, not complete, but has some useful data points. Dicklyon (talk) 03:46, 2 June 2018 (UTC)

Probably we should say he is often credited as the inventor of the digital camera, ref a bunch of sources, and link to an article that provides a more detailed look at the evolution of digital cameras (do we have such an article already? Maybe work on History of the camera#Digital cameras?). Dicklyon (talk) 18:40, 3 June 2018 (UTC)

Copyright?

Not sure what the rules are, but this article on Steven Sasson is pretty much a direct copy of the MSNBC article in the "external links" section.

For example, from the Wiki article: "He set about constructing the digital circuitry from scratch, using oscilloscope measurements as a guide. There were no images to look at until the entire prototype — an 8-pound (3.6-kilogram), toaster-size contraption — was assembled. In December 1975, Sasson and his chief technician persuaded a lab assistant to pose for them. The black-and-white image, captured at a resolution of .01 megapixels (10,000 pixels), took 23 seconds to record onto a digital cassette tape and another 23 seconds to read off a playback unit onto a television. Then it popped up on the screen."

From the MSNBC article: "He set about constructing the digital circuitry from scratch, relying on oscilloscope measurements to guide him. There were no images to look at until the entire prototype was put together. ... in December 1975, Sasson and his chief technician, Jim Schueckler, persuaded a lab assistant to pose for them. The image took 23 seconds to record onto the cassette and another 23 seconds to read off a playback unit onto a television. Then it popped up on the screen."

Example two, from the Wiki article: ""You could see the silhouette of her hair," Sasson said. But her face was a blur of static. "She was less than happy with the photograph and left, saying 'You need work,"' he said. But Sasson already knew the solution: reversing a set of wires, the assistant's face was restored."

From the MSNBC article: ""You could see the silhouette of her hair," Sasson said. But her face was a blur of static. "She was less than happy with the photograph and left, saying 'You need work,'" he said. But an overjoyed Sasson already knew the solution: By simply reversing a set of wires, the assistant's face was restored."

It might be fine, but it seems a little too closely worded when compared to the "external link" that isn't even documented as a "reference". 151.191.175.207 (talk) 23:03, 18 December 2009 (UTC)

It's not fine. This initial 2005 version of the article is directly from this news story (link may not work; title finds it: "Digital camera turns 30 – sort of"). You reported it in 2009, and it still hung around until fixed here in 2011. Dicklyon (talk) 05:25, 28 May 2018 (UTC)

Fraudulent GA tag?

A GA tag was added to the article with this edit. Since I can find no evidence a review was conducted, I've removed the tag. If this is an error, just let me know. In the meantime, thanks to User:Why Not A Duck for the catch. -- Khazar2 (talk) 20:27, 26 June 2013 (UTC)

What is a 4th mill?

"Leica Camera AG honored Sasson by giving him the 4th mill a limited edition 18-megapixel Leica M9 Titanium at Photokina 2009." WilliamSommerwerck (talk) 13:45, 11 November 2014 (UTC)

External links modified

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The archive link showed the RPS Progress Medal recipients through 2011; it was too old to show Sasson in 2012. So I found the new link and got rid of the archive link. It also shows that I got the medal before he did, not that that's relevant. Dicklyon (talk) 05:41, 28 May 2018 (UTC)