Digital camera turns 30 — sort of

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Completing their final voltage-variation test 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.

"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.

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Sasson's show-and-tell presentations over the next year "met with a lot of curiosity, some annoyance," he said. "Many times people talked about all the reasons why it would never happen. But there were many people that quietly looked at it and said, 'Boy, it's a long time, but I don't see that it won't happen.'

When Sony marketed the first filmless camera in 1981, a Mavica that worked off magnetic disks, Sasson thought: "Exciting development, wrong approach." It was based on television technology, "which had inherent limitations in image quality," he said.

Besides, Kodak wouldn't be rushed.

Considering that Eastman's $1 Brownie camera turned photography into a hobby for the masses way back in 1900, some critics insist Kodak discovered the "next big thing" and didn't bring it out quickly enough, letting Japanese rivals drive the digital-camera market.

The story is reminiscent of one of technology's biggest fumbles: In the 1970s, Xerox Corp. researchers in Silicon Valley invented seminal aspects of personal computing that were virtually ignored by the parent company and ultimately used by others.

But Chris Chute, a photography analyst at research firm IDC in Framingham, Mass., views Kodak as an easy target because it "keeps all doors open as long as possible until the real opportunities start to shape themselves."

Unquestionably, though, Kodak's dash to transform itself into a digital heavyweight has left a painful trail: Tumbling sales of film, which still accounts for the bulk of its profits, will soon drop its global payroll below 50,000 employees from a peak of 145,300 in 1988.

While most of Sasson's career has revolved around finding ways to capture, store, transmit and manipulate digital images, he now specializes in protecting Kodak's intellectual property.

His prototype will form the root of historical arguments against Sony in an upcoming patent-infringement trial over Kodak's digital-camera inventions from 1987 to 2003.

In looking back at Kodak's long road to the digital age, Sasson doesn't believe his employer ultimately was late to the game.

"As much as other people may have introduced cameras earlier, I submit those cameras probably were not very easy to use — or very good by image-quality standards," he said. "The mission is the same as George Eastman's: Take this very important art and turn it into something 'as convenient as the pencil.'"

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