lineage
digicams

A Casio QV-10, the LCD digital camera of 1995. Photo Noische at Japanese Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Digicams

11 traced influences · 4 sources

dig digicams

What it took directly

  1. documentedThe Casio QV-10's screen took from a small Casio LCD TV strapped onto an overheating prototype"They solved the problem by attaching a small Casio LCD TV on top of the camera. This experience lead to the idea of incorporating a LCD screen on a digital camera." The Digital Camera Museum, "History of the digital camera and digital imaging"
  2. documentedThe Casio QV-10 took from Hitoshi Nakayama's "LCD-TV with an eye", a wooden mock-up he showed Casio's president"Nakayama thought that when people cannot watch commcercial broadcasts anywhere and anytime, why not let them watch images they took earlier. A LCD-TV with an eye. He made a wooden mock-up model and proposed the idea to the president." The Digital Camera Museum, "History of the digital camera and digital imaging"
  3. documentedSteven Sasson's Kodak camera took from a lens scavenged from a used Super-8 movie camera, and a cassette recorder"The final result was a Rube Goldberg device with a lens scavenged from a used Super-8 movie camera; a portable digital cassette recorder" James Estrin, The New York Times Lens blog (Aug. 12, 2015)

What it learned to do

  1. documentedHiroyuki Suetaka, the Casio engineer behind the QV-10 learned from Sony's 1981 Mavica announcement"Hiroyuki Suetaka, an engineer who designed LSI for watches at Casio, witnessed the Sony Mavica announcement in 1981 and felt that the electronic camera business was something that should be watched closely." The Digital Camera Museum, "History of the digital camera and digital imaging"
  2. documentedCasio's camera team learned from the failure of its own analog still-video camera, the VS-101"He reviewed the VS-101 and it's flaws and analyzed why it failed to sell. The reason was simple. It was analog." The Digital Camera Museum, "History of the digital camera and digital imaging"
  3. statedSteven Sasson learned from a broad assignment from his supervisor, Gareth Lloyd"Sasson, who'd recently earned a master's in electrical engineering, said his supervisor, Gareth Lloyd, gave him a "very broad assignment: He just said, 'Could we build a camera using solid-state imagers?' "" Steven Sasson, to Ben Dobbin, Associated Press (Sep 8, 2005)

The tradition it sits in

  1. documentedThe Kodak digital camera comes from an earlier Kodak CCD camera David Lewis built in 1974, before Sasson's"In 1974, kodak engineer David Lewis, from the Kodak apparatus research lab, also tinkered with the famous Fairchild type 201CCD (100x100 pixel) and created the first Kodak CCD camera, even before Steven Sasson did." The Digital Camera Museum, citing Eastman Museum material; this disputes the usual account that Sasson was first
  2. documentedThe 2020s digicam revival comes from Y2K-era point-and-shoots dug out of closets and bought secondhand"Searches surged for older point-and-shoot cameras with megapixel counts in the single digits, scooped up by digging through closets or searching on secondhand websites." Hillary K. Grigonis, Digital Camera World (14 July 2026)
  3. inferredThe digicam's look-at-the-back habit comes from the Casio QV-10, the first digital camera with an LCD screen"Casio launched the first digital camera with LCD screen. The Casio QV-10 is now officially recognized for sparking the digital camera boom." inferred — the Digital Camera Museum credits the QV-10 as the first digital camera with an LCD screen and with sparking the digital camera boom; that today's digicam shooters inherit its screen-first way of shooting is our reading, not a source's

Where the whole form comes from

  1. documentedThe digital camera comes from the charge-coupled device, invented at Bell Labs by George E. Smith and Willard Boyle"The charge-coupled-device (CCD) was invented at AT&T Bell Labs by nobel prize winners George E. Smith and Willard Sterling Boyle on October 18, 1969." The Digital Camera Museum, "History of the digital camera and digital imaging"
  2. documentedDigital photography comes from Eugene F. Lally's 1961 JPL paper, "Mosaic Guidance for Interplanetary Travel""Eugene F. Lally (while at JPL for NASA) published a paper in February of 1961 called "Mosaic Guidance for Interplanetary Travel"" The Digital Camera Museum, "History of the digital camera and digital imaging"

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