Apple QuickTake 100 by Kodak
Toronto. Ahh, the 1960s. I remember them well. One big hit in 1965 was the iconic song The Eve of Destruction sung by Barry McGuire. Sadly, unlike the song’s writer, the late P. F. Sloan, McGuire was a “one hit wonder”.
Little did we realize that three decades later we were truly on the eve of destruction with the digital wave finally reaching the awareness of the photographic consumer before growing to tsunami proportions wiping out traditional well established photographic industries in the coming decades.
Relatively inexpensive consumer digital photography began in 1994 as an inauspicious movie-like camera called a QuickTake 100 sold by Apple. It took 8 minuscule 640×480 pixel images, suitable for the screen size of the most popular computers at the time. The lens was an 8mm fixed equivalent of a 50mm f/2 standard lens on a 35mm film camera. No preview screen. No image viewing other than by computer! But the images were all in 24bit colour.
A history of digital cameras is posted here on the Digital Camera Museum site. My thanks to our founder and fellow Apple enthusiast, John Linsky, for this Throwback Thursday link at DP Review. (John and I both use a 5120×2880 pixel computer screen today – about 38x the resolution of computer screens in 1994.)
