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It’s very likely that if you own a camera phone, you take pictures on a daily basis. Nowadays, it’s difficult to imagine our lives without the option to snap a picture in a matter of seconds at any given moment. However, this was not the case just a few decades ago.
While the image that is considered by many to be the first photograph ever—the view from the French inventor Joseph Nicéphore Niépce’s window that he captured using a process known as heliography—was taken back in 1826, the first camera phone was only introduced at the turn of the century while the origins of digital photography lead us back to the early 1970s (and a person named Steven Sasson).
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In 1973, a young engineer named Steven Sasson went to work for Eastman Kodak—a company that has been producing photography-related products since the late 19th century—thus starting the process of the development of digital photography. It has since then evolved into people being able to take incredibly vivid pictures with not only a professional camera, but even the cameras on their phones.
Upon arriving at Kodak, Sasson was given a seemingly insignificant task of trying to figure out if there is any practical use for a charged coupled device (C.C.D.)—a light-sensitive device that is able to convert light input into electronic signals—The New York Time reports. Sasson has said that hardly anyone knew about him working on it; not because it was a secret, but because it wasn’t “that big of a project”.
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After years of hard work and determination, Sasson found a way to present people with photographic images, albeit in a quality that nowadays would be considered miserable at best.
“It only took 50 milliseconds to capture the image, but it took 23 seconds to record it to the tape,” The New York Times report Saason saying. “I’d pop the cassette tape out, hand it to my assistant and he put it in our playback unit. About 30 seconds later, up popped the 100 pixel by 100 pixel black and white image.”
To put that into perspective, phone camera resolutions nowadays typically range from 12MP to 48MP, with one megapixel (MP) equaling 1,000,000 pixels.
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Despite the first digital camera being patented back in 1978, Sasson was not allowed to publicly discuss it or show it to anyone outside the Kodak company.
Roughly a decade later, together with his colleague, Robert Hills, he created the first modern digital single-lens reflex (D.S.L.R.) camera with a 1.2 megapixel sensor, which used image compression and memory cards.
It’s evident that photography has developed in leaps and bounds since then, as some cameras nowadays have sensors of more than 100MP.
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It’s not surprising that with camera phones developing at a cosmic pace, fewer people see the point of having a second device just to take pictures. According to Statista’s 2023 data, fewer representatives of the younger generation—those aged 18 to 29, in this case—owned a digital camera compared to their older counterparts (those 30 to 64 years of age). Of the former group, 28% people reportedly owned a camera vs. 34-36% of the older respondents who did.
The fact that camera phones are overtaking actual cameras is evident by looking at the statistics of camera industry growth; or lack of the latter. According to a Japan-based industry group, CIPA, comprising members such as OM Digital Solutions (formerly Olympus), Canon and Nikon, camera shipments worldwide have dropped by 93 percent between 2010 and 2022, Statista reports. In 2022, there were just over two million cameras with built-in lenses shipped by CIPA members, which was nearly 109 million less compared to 2010.
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According to Photutorial, now in 2024, people take an astonishing 54,000 photos every second, which equals 1.94 trillion per year. To put that into perspective, say “One Mississippi” out loud and imagine having to add 54,000 new pictures to a photo album. Seems crazy, doesn’t it?
While a few people who regularly take pictures with their devices end up printing them and lining them up neatly in an album, many images end up online. So, if you’d like to browse more of similar random pics, we have an entire category dedicated to all sorts of weird pictures, and if you’re looking for something captured on one’s phone, here are some pictures taken on people’s camera phones, which, surprisingly, they didn’t take themselves.