Steve J. Sasson is an American

electrical engineer Electrical engineering is an engineering discipline concerned with the study, design, and application of equipment, devices, and systems that use electricity, electronics, and electromagnetism. It emerged as an identifiable occupation in the l ...

and the inventor of the self-contained (portable)

digital camera A digital camera, also called a digicam, is a camera that captures photographs in Digital data storage, digital memory. Most cameras produced today are digital, largely replacing those that capture images on photographic film or film stock. Dig ...

. He joined

Kodak The Eastman Kodak Company, referred to simply as Kodak (), is an American public company that produces various products related to its historic basis in film photography. The company is headquartered in Rochester, New York, and is incorporated i ...

shortly after his graduation from engineering school and retired from Kodak in 2001.

Early life and education

Sasson was born in

Brooklyn, New York Brooklyn is a Boroughs of New York City, borough of New York City located at the westernmost end of Long Island in the New York (state), State of New York. Formerly an independent city, the borough is coextensive with Kings County, one of twelv ...

, the son of Ragnhild Tomine (Endresen) and John Vincent Sasson. His mother was Norwegian. He attended and graduated from

Brooklyn Technical High School Brooklyn Technical High School, commonly called Brooklyn Tech and administratively designated High School 430, is a public specialized high school in New York City that specializes in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. It is on ...

. He is a 1972 (BS) and 1973 (MS) graduate of

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (; RPI) is a private university, private research university in Troy, New York, United States. It is the oldest technological university in the English-speaking world and the Western Hemisphere. It was establishe ...

electrical engineering Electrical engineering is an engineering discipline concerned with the study, design, and application of equipment, devices, and systems that use electricity, electronics, and electromagnetism. It emerged as an identifiable occupation in the l ...

First self-contained digital camera

Steven Sasson developed a portable, battery operated, self-contained digital camera at Kodak in 1975.History of the digital camera and digital imaging
, Digital Camera Museum It weighed and used a Fairchild CCD image sensor having only 100 × 100 pixels (0.01

megapixel In digital imaging, a pixel (abbreviated px), pel, or picture element is the smallest addressable element in a Raster graphics, raster image, or the smallest addressable element in a dot matrix display device. In most digital display devices, p ...

s). The images were digitally recorded onto a

cassette tape The Compact Cassette, also commonly called a cassette tape, audio cassette, or simply tape or cassette, is an analog audio, analog magnetic tape recording format for Sound recording and reproduction, audio recording and playback. Invented by L ...

, a process that took twenty-three seconds per image. His camera took images in

black and white Black-and-white (B&W or B/W) images combine black and white to produce a range of achromatic brightnesses of grey. It is also known as greyscale in technical settings. Media The history of various visual media began with black and white, ...

. As he set out on his design project, he envisioned a camera without mechanical moving parts (although his device did have moving parts, such as the tape drive). In 1977, Kodak filed a patent application on some features of Sasson's prototype camera. Titled "electronic still camera", the patent listed Sasson and Gareth Lloyd as co-inventors. The issued patent, U.S. patent number 4,131,919, Patent – Electronic Still camera claims an arrangement that allows the CCD to be read out quickly ("in real time") into a temporary buffer of

random-access memory Random-access memory (RAM; ) is a form of Computer memory, electronic computer memory that can be read and changed in any order, typically used to store working Data (computing), data and machine code. A random-access memory device allows ...

and then written to storage at the lower speed of the storage device. Most modern digital cameras still use such an arrangement, which had been described in an earlier MIT patent that employed a

vidicon Video camera tubes are devices based on the cathode-ray tube that were used in television cameras to capture television images, prior to the introduction of charge-coupled device (CCD) image sensors in the 1980s. Several different types of tubes ...

sensor rather than a CCD. His prototype was not the first camera that produced digital images, but it was the first hand-held digital camera. Earlier examples of digital cameras included the Multi Spectral Scanner on Landsat 1; which took digital photographs of

Yosemite Yosemite National Park ( ) is a national park of the United States in California. It is bordered on the southeast by Sierra National Forest and on the northwest by Stanislaus National Forest. The park is managed by the National Park Service ...

before it was launched in 1972; cameras used for astronomical photography; experimental devices by Michael Francis Tompsett ''et al.''; and the commercial product and hobbyist camera called the

Cromemco Cyclops The Cromemco Cyclops, introduced in 1975 by Cromemco, was the first commercial digital camera, all-digital camera using a digital imaging, digital metal–oxide–semiconductor (MOS) image sensor. It was also the first digital camera to be interf ...

Life and career

His work on digital cameras began in 1975 with a broad assignment from his supervisor at

Eastman Kodak The Eastman Kodak Company, referred to simply as Kodak (), is an American public company that produces various products related to its historic basis in film photography. The company is headquartered in Rochester, New York, and is incorporated i ...

Company, Gareth A. Lloyd: to attempt to build an electronic camera using a commercially available

charge-coupled device A charge-coupled device (CCD) is an integrated circuit containing an array of linked, or coupled, capacitors. Under the control of an external circuit, each capacitor can transfer its electric charge to a neighboring capacitor. CCD sensors are a ...

(CCD). The resulting camera invention was awarded the U.S. patent number 4,131,919. Sasson retired from Eastman Kodak Company in 2009 and began working as a consultant in an

intellectual property Intellectual property (IP) is a category of property that includes intangible creations of the human intellect. There are many types of intellectual property, and some countries recognize more than others. The best-known types are patents, co ...

protection role. Sasson joined the

University of South Florida The University of South Florida (USF) is a Public university, public research university with its main campus located in Tampa, Florida, Tampa, Florida, United States, and other campuses in St. Petersburg, Florida, St. Petersburg and Sarasota, ...

Institute for Advanced Discovery & Innovation in 2018, where he is a member and courtesy professor. On November 17, 2009,

U.S. President The president of the United States (POTUS) is the head of state and head of government of the United States. The president directs the Federal government of the United States#Executive branch, executive branch of the Federal government of t ...

Barack Obama Barack Hussein Obama II (born August 4, 1961) is an American politician who was the 44th president of the United States from 2009 to 2017. A member of the Democratic Party, he was the first African American president in American history. O ...

awarded Sasson the

National Medal of Technology and Innovation The National Medal of Technology and Innovation (formerly the National Medal of Technology) is an honor granted by the president of the United States to American inventors and innovators who have made significant contributions to the development ...

at a ceremony in the

East Room The East Room is an event and reception room in the Executive Residence of the White House complex, the home of the president of the United States. The East Room is the largest room in the Executive Residence; it is used for dances, receptions, p ...

of the

White House The White House is the official residence and workplace of the president of the United States. Located at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue Northwest (Washington, D.C.), NW in Washington, D.C., it has served as the residence of every U.S. president ...

. This is the highest honor awarded by the US government to scientists, engineers, and inventors. On September 6, 2012, The

Royal Photographic Society The Royal Photographic Society of Great Britain, commonly known as the Royal Photographic Society (RPS), is the world's oldest photographic society having been in continuous existence since 1853. It was founded in London, England, in 1853 as th ...

awarded Sasson its Progress Medal and Honorary Fellowship "in recognition of any invention, research, publication or other contribution that has resulted in an important advance in the scientific or technological development of photography or imaging in the widest sense." Leica Camera AG honored Sasson by presenting to him one of its cameras at the Photokina 2010 trade show event. Sasson was inducted into the

National Inventors Hall of Fame The National Inventors Hall of Fame (NIHF) is an American not-for-profit organization, founded in 1973, which recognizes individual engineers and inventors who hold a US patent of significant technology. Besides the Hall of Fame, it also operate ...

in 2011, and later elected as a Fellow of the

National Academy of Inventors The National Academy of Inventors (NAI) is a US non-profit organization dedicated to encouraging inventors in academia, following the model of the National Academies of the United States. It was founded at the University of South Florida in 201 ...

in 2018.

Patents

* Patent – Electronic Still camera

References

External links

The Dawn of Digital Photography
- interview with Steven Sasson on the invention of the digital camera
Disruptive Innovation: The Story of the First Digital Camera
lecture by Steven Sasson at the

Linda Hall Library The Linda Hall Library is a privately endowed American library of science, engineering and technology located in Kansas City, Missouri, on the grounds of a urban arboretum. It claims to be the "largest independently funded public library of sc ...

(October 26, 2011) {{DEFAULTSORT:Sasson, Steven Year of birth missing (living people) Living people 20th-century American inventors 21st-century American inventors Digital photography Kodak people Engineers from Brooklyn American electrical engineers Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute alumni Place of birth missing (living people) Brooklyn Technical High School alumni American people of Norwegian descent Engineers from New York (state)