GROUP PROJECT BRIEF

Creativity & Innovation Management

MA. Mai P. Nguyen
Spring 2022

Submission format and Instructions:

 This is a group assignment.

 The submission format is in the form of a written assignment.

 The assignment should have a cover page that includes students' names and IDs.

 Include a content sheet with a list of all headings and page numbers.

 Plagiarism is unacceptable. Students must cite all sources and input the information by
paraphrasing, summarising or using direct quotes. A Fail Grade is given when Plagiarism
is identified in your work. There are no exceptions.

 Your evidence/findings must be cited using Harvard Referencing Style.

 This assignment should be written in a concise, formal business style using Arial 12 or
Times New Roman 13 font size and 1.5 spacing.

 The word limit is 5,000 words (+/- 10%). If you exceed the word limit (excluding
references and administrative sections) your grade will be penalised.

 You MUST complete and submit a softcopy of your work on the due dates provided by
Instructor. All late work is not allowed to submit. This rule is not waived under any
circumstances. The softcopy must be submitted to Turn-it-in in LMS. One submission
per group is allowed.

 Read ALL Instructions on this Page

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 Assessment Brief and Guidance:

A brief history of the digital camera

Figure 1 The first prototype digital camera, developed by Kodak's Steven Sasson

From theoretical beginnings as a space-travel navigation aid, the digital camera developed from tapeless
analogue cameras through sky-charting behemoths to consumer concepts and beyond. To explore that long
history, we've charted the milestones, the groundbreakers -- and the downright strange. Take a look to see
where your camera came from, as we visit Grandad Kodak, Uncle Apple and a whole family tree of camera
cousins.

The beginnings
The history of the digital camera began with Eugene F. Lally of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. When he
wasn't coming up with ways to create artificial gravity he was thinking about how to use a mosaic photo
sensor to capture digital images. His 1961 idea was to take pictures of the planets and stars while travelling
through space, in order to help establish the astronauts' position. Unfortunately, as with Texas Instrument
employee Willis Adcock's filmless camera (US patent 4,057,830) in 1972, the technology had yet to catch
up with the concept.
The camera generally recognised as the first digital still snapper was a prototype (US patent 4,131,919)
developed by Eastman Kodak engineer Steven Sasson in 1975. He cobbled together some Motorola parts
with a Kodak movie-camera lens and some newly invented Fairchild CCD electronic sensors.
The resulting camera, pictured above on its first trip to Europe recently, was the size of a large toaster and
weighed nearly 4kg. Black-and-white images were captured on a digital cassette tape, and viewing them
required Sasson and his colleagues to also develop a special screen.

The resolution was a revolutionary .01 megapixels and it took 23 seconds to record the first digital
photograph. Talk about shutter lag.
Some believe that Kodak missed a trick by not developing this technological breakthrough, with film
remaining their bread and butter. The next step in the process would come from elsewhere.

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 Figure 2 SONY’s Magnetic Video Camera

The end of film?

The first commercial CCD camera was developed by Fairchild in 1976. The MV-101 was used to inspect
Procter & Gamble products. The following year Konica introduced the C35-AF, the world's first compact
point-and-shoot autofocus camera. But the filmless age was kickstarted on 25 August 1981, when Sony
demonstrated the first camera to bear the name Mavica (Magnetic Video Camera).
Not strictly a digital camera, the Mavica was actually an analogue television camera. It stored pictures on
two-inch floppy disks called Mavipaks that could hold up to fifty colour photos for playback on a television
or monitor. CCD size was 570x490 pixels on a 10x12mm chip. The light sensitivity of the sensor was ISO
200 and the shutter speed was fixed at 1/60 second. It ran off AA batteries.

Figure 3 CANON’s RC-250 Xapshot

The analogue age

Analogue cameras may have been the start of the digital age, in that they recorded images on to electronic
media, but they never really took off due to poor image quality and prohibitive cost. They were mainly used
by newspapers to cover events such as the 1984 Olympics, the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 and the
Gulf War in 1991. Canon launched the first analogue camera to go on sale, the RC-701, in 1986, and

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followed it with the RC-250 Xapshot, the first consumer analogue camera, in 1988.
The Xapshot was called the Ion in Europe, and the Q-PIC in Japan. It cost $499 in the US, but consumers
had to splash out a further $999 on a battery, computer interface card with software, and floppy disks.
Think about that the next time you get annoyed when you have to pay extra for memory cards.
Figure 4 Photo of auroras taken by All-Sky camera

The coming of true digital

The first true digital camera that actually worked was built in 1981. The University of Calgary Canada ASI
Science Team built the Fairchild All-Sky camera to photograph auroras, an example of which is shown on
the right of our picture.
The All-Sky Camera utilised more of those 100x100-pixel Fairchild CCDs, which had been around since
1973. What made the All-Sky Camera truly digital was that it recorded digital data rather than analogue. In
October 1981 the digital revolution rolled on with the release of the world's first consumer compact disk
player, the Sony CDP-101.

Colani's concepts: the future of cameras?

In 1983, Canon commissioned outspoken designer Luigi Colani to envision the future of camera
design. The chap who believed that "an egg represents the highest form of packaging since the dawn of
time" drew on his "no straight lines in the universe" philosophy to create the 5 Systems. These designs
included (top left to right) the Hy-Pro, an SLR design with an LCD viewfinder, a novice camera named
(rather politically incorrectly) the Lady, the Super C. Bio with power zoom and built-in flash, and the
underwater Frog.

Figure 5 HOMIC (Horizontal Memorychip Integral storobo Camera)

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Figure 5 shows the HOMIC (Horizontal Memorychip Integral storobo Camera). This was a Gerry
Anderson-esque concept for a still video camera recording to solid-state memory. Unusually, the lens and
viewfinder were on the same axis, while the flash fired through the objective lens.
The HOMIC was exhibited at the 1984 Photokina, but was never marketed.

Figure 6 The 1990 Dycam Model 1

Digital hits the shops

The first true digital handheld camera was the Fuji DS-1P, developed in 1988 but never sold. It recorded
images as computerised files. These were saved on a 16MB SRAM internal memory card, which was
jointly developed with Toshiba. That same year, Digital Darkroom became the first image-manipulation
program for the Macintosh computer.
Also in 1988, the first JPEG and MPEG standards were set.
The first digital camera to actually go on sale was the 1990 Dycam Model 1 (pictured). A grey version was
marketed as the Logitech Fotoman. It used a CCD image sensor, stored pictures digitally, and connected
directly to a PC for download.

Figure 7 Hasselblad DB 4000

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 Digital comes to SLR
Digital backs were attached to film cameras in some SLR systems. An example of this is the Hasselblad
DB 4000 with a Leaf back (figure 7), which arrived in 1991. It packed a 2,048x2,048-pixel CCD and 8-bit
storage.
Adobe PhotoShop 1.0 hit the shops in 1990.

Figure 8 The Kodak DCS 200

Digital goes online!

Mosaic, the first web browser that let users view photographs over the Web, was released by the National
Center for Supercomputing Applications in 1992.
That year also saw the the Kodak DCS 200 (pictured) debut with a built-in hard drive. It was based on the
Nikon N8008s and came in five combinations of black and white or colour, with and without hard drive.
Resolution was 1.54 million pixels, roughly four times the resolution of still-video cameras.

Figure 9 The QuickTake 200

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 Apple gets in on the action: the QuickTake
You'd have to live under a rock to not know that Apple makes phones these days, but did you know it also
had a crack at the digital camera market? The Apple QuickTake 100 (figure 9 top), launched in 1994, was
actually manufactured by Kodak, and was the the first colour digital camera for under $1,000. It packed a
640x480-pixel CCD and could stash up to eight 640x480 images in the internal memory.
The QuickTake 200 (figure 9, pictured below) followed later, and was built by Fujifilm.

Figure 10 The OLYMPUS’s Deltis VC-1100 (left) and KODAK’s DC-25 (right)

Connected cameras and CompactFlash

The first 'photo quality' desktop inkjet printer arrived in 1994. The Epson MJ-700V2C (pictured left)
managed 720x720 dots per inch.
Later that year, the Olympus Deltis VC-1100 (figure 10, pictured left) became the world's first digital

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camera with built-in transmission capabilities. With a modem connected, photos could be transmitted over
phone lines -- even mobiles -- although it took about six minutes to transmit high-quality images. Image
resolution was 768x576 pixels, the shutter speed could be set between 1/8 and 1/1000 second, and it
included a colour LCD viewfinder.
SmartMedia card and CompactFlash cards also arrived that year. The first camera to use CompactFlash was
the Kodak DC-25 (figure 10, pictured right) in 1996.

Figure 11 The CASIO’s QV-10

The shape of things to come

The shape of compact digital cameras began to emerge in Casio QV-10 in 1995, which was the first with an
LCD screen on the back. The screen measured 46mm (1.8 inches) from corner to corner.
It was also the first consumer digital camera with a pivoting lens. Photos were captured by a 1/5-inch
460x280-pixel CCD and stored to a semiconductor memory, which held up to 96 colour still images. Other
now-familiar features included macro positioning, automatic exposure, auto-playback of images and a self
timer. It cost $1,000.

Figure 12 The Ricoh RDC-1

In 1995, the first digital camera to shoot both still photos and movie footage with sound appeared. The
Ricoh RDC-1 included a removable 64mm (2.5-inch) colour LCD screen. The CCD packed a 768x480-
pixel resolution, while the zoom clocked in at 3x and f/2.8. More than a decade later and those are still the
baseline specs for compacts (apart from the resolution, of course).
The RDC-1 would have set you back a hefty $1,500.

Figure 13 The CANON’s PowerShot 600

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 Webcams and compacts
In 1995, Logitech debuted the VideoMan, its first webcam, and the first colour digital video camera for the
personal computer.
The now-familiar compact shape continued to emerge with the Canon PowerShot 600 (pictured) in 1996. It
had a 1/3-inch, 832x608-pixel CCD, built-in flash, auto white balance and an optical viewfinder as well as
an LCD display. It was the first consumer digital camera able to write images to a hard disk drive, and
could store up to 176MB. It cost $949.

Figure 14 The PENTAX’s EI-C90

The digital age!

And there we have it. Although compacts were appearing in strange shapes, such as the Pentax EI-C90,
which split into two sections, the basic form factor was laid down for today's multi-megapixel monsters --
roughly the same size as the tape cassette Steve Sasson used to record one grainy image (pictured).
Camera phones and CMOS sensors appeared in 1997, while megapixel counts are constantly climbing.
The Hasselblad H3D II The Hasselblad H3D II digital SLR is a 39-megapixel behemoth (figure 15).
In order to process that frankly ridiculous 5,412x7,212-pixel resolution, the H3D II packs a 48x36mm
image sensor. To keep that leviathan of a sensor cool, Hasselblad has jammed in a physical heatsink, which
dissipates the heat generated to the entire camera body.
There's also a whopping 76mm (3-inch) screen for previewing images, and Hasselblad claims that handling
is better than on the original H3D, as the controls have been moved to within thumb reach. The H3D II
shoots raw footage -- imagine the size of those files! -- and also boasts a GPS receiver for geotagging your

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pictures. This embeds location information in the image file so that Google Earth, which the camera links
directly to, or sites such as Flickr, can show where the image was taken on a map.
Of course, 39 megapixels is pretty ludicrous, and so is the £18,500 price tag. Hasselblad has taken this into
account by offering two lesser versions of the H3D II, available to us lesser mortals that don't need to shoot
photos the size of billboards. Well, kind of: they offer 22- and 31-megapixel sensors. We may need to save
up.
How far we've come.

Figure 15 The HASSELBLAD’s H3D II

Source:
1. Richard Trenholm (2007), Photos: The history of the digital camera,
https://www.cnet.com/news/photos-the-history-of-the-digital-camera/
2. Richard Trenholm (2007), Hasselblad H3D II: Megapixel madness,
https://www.cnet.com/news/hasselblad-h3d-ii-megapixel-madness/

------End of the scenario------

Questions:

1: The history of technological change in camera industry is bound with initial radical breakthroughs
(inventions with patents) followed by incremental improvements (innovations). Highlight the
inventions and innovations that bring the new product in this industry. Determine the difference
between (1) inventions of technological breakthroughs and (2) major innovations and (3)
minor/incremental innovations.

2: Analyze the competition among various digital cameras (product innovation) in their product-
line:
 Build the S-cure for the evolution of digital camera and film camera.
 How was the performance of digital camera improved over time?
 When film cameras were, at first, challenged by the first commercial filmless digital camera
(SONY’s MAVICA), describe the rival technology (technology of MAVICA) at time T1 in
the S-curve? How was the performance of the MAVICA by the time T1 when it, at first,
entered the market?

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3: Analyse the case of first prototype digital camera, developed by Kodak's Steven Sasson:
 Explain how Kodak’s organisational vision, leadership, culture shaped the company
innovations and commercialisations toward digital camera.
 Why Kodak missed a trick by not developing this technological breakthrough?

Note: student could enrich evident and data for their analysis by searching on the internet, do
remember to cite the source of information.

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