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Ancient, cassette-tape-using digital camera

By Rain Noe - August 25, 2010

in Tech | Object Culture

I always thought Sony's Digital Mavica digital camera from 1997, the one that took floppy disks, was the first digital camera; turns out I was off by almost 20 years. Check out this fossil:

Writes finder Scott Hansen in his ISO50 blog,

This is a prototype digital camera Kodak produced way back in 1975. The "toaster-sized" system relied on a cassette tape for recording data. The digitized images took 23 seconds to record to tape which then had to be played back using a specialized system.

Never mind the 23-second lag time, I'm sure the kids of today would look at this and say "But what the heck would you need a camera for, before Facebook was invented?" Well, once upon a time, storing printed photographs was our way of recycling shoeboxes.

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octo

14 years ago

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not digital, I remember this cassette based video camera blew my mind when I was 10: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PXL-2000 - it was marketed at kids, and I think somebody must have had one.
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