We take these for granted, but someone had to invent them. Today, we carry 4K cinema cameras in our pockets. But the road to the iPhone was paved with 8-pound prototypes, cassette tape storage, and $20,000 price tags. These are the forgotten pioneers that built the digital world.

1. First Digital Image (1957): Russell Kirsch’s Son

What is widely regarded as the first digital photograph wasn’t taken with a camera. It couldn’t have been, because digital cameras didn’t exist yet.

In 1957, Russell Kirsch worked at the National Bureau of Standards, where he and his team were experimenting with ways to teach computers to “see.” They started with a drum scanner, a rotating cylinder that could read information line by line from a physical object. Kirsch fed it a 5×5 cm film photograph of his infant son, Walden.

The result was a 176×176 pixel square, roughly 0.03 megapixels. The scan was originally 1-bit (pure black and white); Kirsch’s team generated grayscale versions by combining multiple thresholded scans. The image is grainy, primitive, and utterly revolutionary. It was the first time a computer ever “saw” the real world.

Kirsch’s experiment proved that analog images could be translated into binary code, processed by a computer, and displayed back to a human. It’s the Genesis moment for everything that followed: Photoshop, Instagram, facial recognition, medical imaging, and every photo you’ve ever taken on your phone. All of it started with a father scanning a picture of his baby.

2. First Digital Camera Prototype (1975): The “Toaster”

Steve Sasson was a young engineer at Kodak when his supervisor gave him a curious assignment: figure out if this new “CCD” thing could be useful. CCDs (charge-coupled devices) were experimental sensors that could convert light into electrical signals. Sasson built a prototype around one.

The result was an 8-pound monster the size of a toaster. Sasson’s prototype used a Fairchild 100×100 pixel CCD, one of the earliest solid-state image sensors. It shot black-and-white images at a resolution of 100×100 pixels (0.01 megapixels). It didn’t use a memory card, because memory cards didn’t exist. Instead, it took 23 seconds to record a single image onto a standard audio cassette tape.

When Sasson demonstrated it to Kodak executives, they were unimpressed. “Why would anyone want to look at their photos on a TV?” they asked. Kodak didn’t turn Sasson’s prototype into a product. The company focused on protecting its film business instead of betting on digital. That hesitation became one of several strategic missteps that contributed to the company’s later decline.

Sasson’s toaster never made it to store shelves, but it proved digital photography was possible. And that was enough. Read the full story here.

3. First Commercial Digital Camera in the U.S. (1990): Dycam Model 1

Fifteen years after Sasson’s prototype, you could finally buy a digital camera. While Fujifilm had already released fully digital still cameras like the FUJIX DS-X in Japan in late 1989, the Dycam Model 1 (also sold as the Logitech Fotoman) was the first digital still camera marketed to consumers in the United States.

It shot exclusively in black and white. Its sensor captured roughly 0.09 megapixels, producing soft, postage-stamp-sized images even by early-’90s standards. It had only 1 MB of internal memory, enough for 32 low-resolution photos. And it had no LCD screen. You looked through an optical viewfinder, took your photos, and then plugged the camera into a computer to see if you’d actually captured anything. It was essentially a blind experience, similar to shooting film, but with terrible image quality.

The Dycam cost about $1,000 at launch, which sounds reasonable until you remember that it could only shoot in black and white at a resolution barely suitable for a newspaper. But it was real. It was available in Western markets. And it was the beginning of the end for film.

Note: Before this digital breakthrough, companies like Sony released “Still Video” cameras (like the 1981 Mavica). These were electronic but analog, recording analog still-video signals onto 2-inch “video floppy” disks rather than digital files.

4. First Digital SLR (1991): Kodak DCS 100

The Kodak DCS 100 (originally released simply as the “Kodak Professional Digital Camera System”) was a Frankenstein creation. Kodak took a professional-grade Nikon F3 film body and hacked a massive digital sensor into the back. The camera was so power-hungry and the files so large that it required a separate Digital Storage Unit (DSU), a hard drive the size of a shoebox that you had to wear on a shoulder strap while shooting.

The resolution was 1.3 megapixels. The price was $20,000 (approximately $45,000 adjusted for inflation). It was sold primarily to news organizations and photojournalists who needed to transmit images electronically on tight deadlines, often via satellite or early data links. The DCS 100 shipped in 1991, just after the Gulf War, but it embodied the needs that war had highlighted: speed, transmission, and immediacy. Film was too slow for near-real-time transmission; for those agencies willing to pay for it, digital was the only practical option.

The DCS 100 was uncomfortable, expensive, and impractical. It was also a revelation. Professional photographers could now shoot, review, and transmit images without developing a single roll of film. The future had arrived, and it weighed 10 pounds with accessories.

5. First Digital Camera With an LCD (1995): Casio QV-10

Before the Casio QV-10, digital cameras were just “film cameras without film.” You looked through a glass viewfinder, pressed the shutter, and hoped for the best.

Casio changed everything by putting a 1.8-inch color LCD on the back of the QV-10. For the first time, you could see your photo immediately after taking it. This introduced the concept of “chimping,” the habit photographers have of looking at the back of their camera after every shot. The QV-10 captured images at about 320×240 pixels and stored them in its internal memory, which you could later transfer to a computer.

The QV-10 also had a swiveling lens. Its swiveling 5.2mm f/2.8 lens let you frame yourself or your subject from odd angles long before “flip screens” were common, arguably making it the first “selfie” camera. You could rotate the lens 180 degrees, point it at yourself, and use the LCD to frame the shot.

Every single digital camera made today follows the blueprint set by this cheap Casio point-and-shoot. The LCD screen is now the defining feature of digital photography, and we have the QV-10 to thank for it.

6. First Camera Phone (1999/2000): The Kyocera VP-210 vs. Sharp J-SH04

The history of the camera phone is messy, because multiple devices have legitimate claims to being “first.”

Technically, the Kyocera VP-210 (1999) was first. It was marketed as a “Visual Phone” for live video calls, with a front-facing camera, but it could also store and send still photos by email.

Then came the Samsung SCH-V200 in June 2000. Released in South Korea, it beat Sharp to market by several months and had a higher resolution (0.35 megapixels). However, the camera and phone components were technically separate; you couldn’t email photos directly from the phone. You had to hook it up to a computer to access them.

The Sharp J-SH04 (2000) is widely considered the true ancestor of modern mobile photography, because it made capturing and sending photos over a cellular network feel like a normal phone feature. It was the first phone that let you take a photo and email it to someone else using Sharp’s “Sha-Mail” service. The resolution was 110,000 pixels (0.11 megapixels). The images were blurry, pixelated, and groundbreaking.

The J-SH04 was only sold in Japan, but it set off a global arms race. Within a few years, camera phones were outselling standalone digital cameras, and by the mid-2000s compact camera sales were in long-term decline. By 2003, camera phones were already outselling digital cameras globally; by 2006, roughly half of all mobile phones shipped with a built-in camera. The phone camera didn’t just disrupt the point-and-shoot industry. It ate it alive.

7. First Full Frame DSLR (2002): Contax N Digital

Most people think the Canon EOS-1Ds was the first full-frame DSLR. It wasn’t.

The Contax N Digital beat Canon to market by several months. Contax had actually announced the N Digital back in 2000, but delays meant it didn’t ship until 2002, just months before Canon’s more polished EOS-1Ds. It featured a 6-megapixel sensor that was the same size as a piece of 35mm film, a massive feat of engineering at the time. Contax, a legendary German-Japanese partnership, had won the race to full frame.

And then everything fell apart.

The sensor, made by Philips, was noisy and power-hungry. The autofocus was slow. The camera was unreliable. Reviews were brutal. Contax’s owner, Kyocera, pulled the plug on the Contax brand in 2005, just a few years later, leaving Canon’s EOS-1Ds and its successors to dominate the full-frame DSLR market.

The Contax N Digital is a cautionary tale: being first doesn’t mean you win. Canon didn’t get there first, but it learned from Contax’s missteps, refined the formula with the 1Ds, and went on to define what “full-frame DSLR” meant for the next decade. But history should remember that Contax got there first, even if they couldn’t make it work.

Conclusion

The devices on this list are ancient by modern standards. Most of them are essentially unusable today. But every photo you take, every Instagram post you upload, every professional campaign you shoot, exists because someone built these machines. Someone proved it could be done.

That’s the thing about innovation. The first version is always clunky, expensive, and imperfect. But it’s also necessary. Without these seven “firsts,” we’d still be loading film into cameras and waiting days to see our photos. Instead, we’re living in a world where everyone is a photographer, and the camera is always in your pocket.