If you’re a digital photography buff, here’s some required trivia knowledge: what you see above is a photograph of the first digital camera ever built. It was created in December 1975 by an engineer at Eastman Kodak named Steve Sasson, now regarded as the inventor of the digital camera. In a Kodak blog post written in 2007, Sasson explains how it was constructed:

It had a lens that we took from a used parts bin from the Super 8 movie camera production line downstairs from our little lab on the second floor in Bldg 4. On the side of our portable contraption, we shoehorned in a portable digital cassette instrumentation recorder. Add to that 16 nickel cadmium batteries, a highly temperamental new type of CCD imaging area array, an a/d converter implementation stolen from a digital voltmeter application, several dozen digital and analog circuits all wired together on approximately half a dozen circuit boards, and you have our interpretation of what a portable all electronic still camera might look like.

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The Washington Post just published an interesting article called “Pros and cons to Facebook’s fast-growing role in digital photography“, which contains quite a few interesting statistics. Among them,

• 40% of households with digital cameras no longer make prints
• 65% of people sharing photos online do it through Facebook
• Less then 33% of people realize that Facebook stores photos at a decreased resolution

The last statistic is quite startling. It means that we may have a whole generation of people who are essentially “throwing away their negatives” after “making very small prints”.

Facebook doesn’t have the capacity to store all the world’s photos without shrinking them first. Facebook just announced that it will increase its maximum photo size by 20 percent. But even with the upgrade, the photo quality on Facebook isn’t useful for more than basic onscreen viewing.

[...] It’s also troubling that most users aren’t aware that uploading a picture to Facebook — and then deleting it from your camera — means you’ve lost the original image for good. [...] This is probably because Facebook photos look just fine on a computer screen.

Remind your friends and family to keep all their original image files. Otherwise, they might need higher resolution versions in the future but find themselves stuck with 720px.

Image credit: Looking at Facebook photo_2008 by hoyasmeg

Nikon recently conducted a survey called “Picture Yourself”, and released some interesting findings today, a lot of which reveals things about the way people view themselves. The survey was conducted using random telephone dialing, and sampled 1000 Americans 18 and older.

If only we had thought of some of these questions for our weekly polls… Maybe we’ll use a few in the future.

Anyhow, here were some interesting findings:

• 25% would choose to retake a family photo if they could turn back time
• 92% of adults had at least one photograph taken of them so far this year
• 79% believe they look better in person than in photographs (do you?)
  
• 26% chose weight as the feature they dislike the most in photos
• Men have an average of 73 photos taken of them, while women have only 38

Are there any other questions you wish Nikon had included in the survey? Let us know, and we’ll conduct “research” with PetaPixel polls!

(via The Imaging Resource)

Image credit: Mirrored self-misidentification by eqqman