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The history of the camera began even before the introduction of photography. Cameras evolved from the camera obscura through many generations of photographic technology – daguerreotypes, calotypes, dry plates, film – to the modern day with digital cameras and camera phones.

Camera obscura (Before the 17th century) -:

The forerunner to the photographic camera was the camera obscura. Camera obscura (Latin for “dark room”) is the natural optical phenomenon that occurs when an image of a scene on the other side of a screen (or for instance a wall) is projected through a small hole in that screen and forms an inverted image (left to right and upside down) on a surface opposite to the opening. The oldest known record of this principle is a description by the Han Chinese philosopher Mozi (c. 470 to c. 391 BC). Mozi correctly asserted that the camera obscura image is inverted because light travels in straight lines from its source. In the 11th century, Arab physicist Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen) wrote very influential books about optics, including experiments with light through a small opening in a darkened room. It was wildly successful after debuting to the public in 1839 when both it and the calotype began introducing photography to the masses. Normally, having portraits taken was an activity exclusive to the upper classes. The cost and amount of time needed to produce such works were unreasonable for most working-class people. The speed of the camera, which only increased as time went on, made it possible for anybody to have quality portraits.

Early photographic camera (18th–19th centuries) -:

The development of the photographic camera, it had been known for hundreds of years that some substances, such as silver salts, darkened when exposed to sunlight.[9]: 4  In a series of experiments, published in 1727, the German scientist Johann Heinrich Schulze demonstrated that the darkening of the salts was due to light alone, and not influenced by heat or exposure to air.[10]: 7 The Swedish chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele showed in 1777 that silver chloride was especially susceptible to darkening from light exposure and that once darkened, it becomes insoluble in an ammonia solution.[10] The first person to use this chemistry to create images was Thomas Wedgwood.

The first permanent photograph of a camera image was made in 1825 by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce using a sliding wooden box camera made by Charles and Vincent Chevalier in Paris.[10]: 9–11  Niépce had been experimenting with ways to fix the images of a camera obscura since 1816. The first photographic camera developed for commercial manufacture was a daguerreotype camera, built by Alphonse Giroux in 1839. Giroux signed a contract with Daguerre and Isidore Niépce to produce the cameras in France,[9]: 8–9  with each device and accessories costing 400 francs.[13]: 38  The camera was a double-box design, with a landscape lens fitted to the outer box, and a holder for the ground glass focusing screen and image plate on the inner box. By sliding the inner box, objects at various distances could be brought to as sharp a focus as desired. After a satisfactory image had been focused on the screen, the screen was replaced with a sensitized plate. A knurled wheel controlled a copper flap in front of the lens, which functioned as a shutter. The early daguerreotype cameras required long exposure times, which in 1839 could be from 5 to 30 minutes.

Within a decade of being introduced in America, 3 general forms of the camera were in popular use: the American- or chamfered-box camera, the Robert’s-type camera or “Boston box”, and the Lewis-type camera. The American-box camera had beveled edges at the front and rear, and an opening in the rear where the formed image could be viewed on the ground glass. The top of the camera had hinged doors for placing photographic plates. Inside there was one available slot for distant objects, and another slot in the back for close-ups. The lens was focused either by sliding or with a rack and pinion mechanism. The Robert’s-type cameras were similar to the American box, except for having a knob-fronted worm gear on the front of the camera, which moved the back box for focusing.

Early fixed images -:

The first partially successful photograph of a camera image was made in approximately 1816 by Nicéphore Niépce,[18][19] using a very small camera of his own making and a piece of paper coated with silver chloride, which darkened where it was exposed to light. His unhardened bitumen was then dissolved away. One of those photographs has survived.

Daguerreotypes and calotypes -:

After Niépce died in 1833, his partner Louis Daguerre continued to experiment and by 1837 had created the first practical photographic process, which he named the daguerreotype and publicly unveiled in 1839.[21] Daguerre treated a silver-plated sheet of copper with iodine vapor to give it a coating of light-sensitive silver iodide. After exposure to the camera, the image was developed by mercury vapor and fixed with a strong solution of ordinary salt (sodium chloride). Henry Fox Talbot perfected a different process, the calotype, in 1840. As commercialized, both processes used very simple cameras consisting of two nested boxes. The rear box had a removable ground glass screen and could slide in and out to adjust the focus. After focusing, the ground glass was replaced with a light-tight holder containing the sensitized plate or paper and the lens was capped.

Dry plates -:

Collodion dry plates had been available since 1857, thanks to the work of Désiré van Monckhoven, but it was not until the invention of the gelatin dry plate in 1871 by Richard Leach Maddox that the wet plate process could be rivaled in quality and speed. The 1878 discovery that heat-ripening a gelatin emulsion greatly increased its sensitivity finally made so-called “instantaneous” snapshot exposures practical.

The invention of photographic film -:

The use of photographic film was pioneered by George Eastman, who started manufacturing paper film in 1885 before switching to celluloid in 1888–1889. His first camera, which he called the “Kodak”, was first offered for sale in 1888. It was a very simple box camera with a fixed-focus lens and single shutter speed, which along with its relatively low price appealed to the average consumer.

35 mm -:

Some manufacturers started to use 35 mm film for still photography between 1905 and 1913. The first 35 mm cameras available to the public, and reaching significant numbers in sales were the Tourist Multiple, in 1913, and the Simplex, in 1914.

TLRs and SLRs -:

The first practical reflex camera was the Franke & Heidecke Rolleiflex medium format TLR of 1928. Though both single- and twin-lens reflex cameras had been available for decades, they were too bulky to achieve much popularity. The Rolleiflex, however, was sufficiently compact to achieve widespread popularity and the medium-format TLR design became popular for both high- and low-end cameras.

Instant cameras -:

Polaroid Model 430, 1971
While conventional cameras were becoming more refined and sophisticated, an entirely new type of camera appeared on the market in 1948. This was the Polaroid Model 95, the world’s first viable instant-picture camera. Known as a Land Camera after its inventor, Edwin Land, the Model 95 used a patented chemical process to produce finished positive prints from the exposed negatives in under a minute.

Automation -:

The first camera to feature automatic exposure was the selenium light meter-equipped, fully automatic Super Kodak Six-20 pack of 1938, but its extremely high price (for the time) of $225 (equivalent to $4,331 in 2021)[23] kept it from achieving any degree of success.

Digital cameras -:

Digital cameras differ from their analog predecessors primarily in that they do not use film but capture and save photographs on digital memory cards or internal storage instead. Their low operating costs have relegated chemical cameras to niche markets.

Digital imaging technology -:

The first semiconductor image sensor was the CCD, invented by Willard S. Boyle and George E. Smith at Bell Labs in 1969.[24] While researching MOS technology, they realized that an electric charge was the analogy of the magnetic bubble and that it could be stored on a tiny MOS capacitor.

Early digital camera prototypes -:

The concept of digitizing images on scanners, and the concept of digitizing video signals, predate the concept of making still pictures by digitizing signals from an array of discrete sensor elements. Early spy satellites used the extremely complex and expensive method of de-orbit and airborne retrieval of film canisters. Technology was pushed to skip these steps through the use of in-satellite development and electronic scanning of the film for direct transmission to the ground. The amount of film was still a major limitation, and this was overcome and greatly simplified by the push to develop an electronic image-capturing array that could be used instead of film.

Analog electronic cameras -:

Handheld electronic cameras, in the sense of a device meant to be carried and used as a handheld film camera, appeared in 1981 with the demonstration of the Sony Mavica (Magnetic Video Camera). This is not to be confused with the later cameras by Sony that also bore the Mavica name.

Early true digital cameras -:

In the late 1980s, the technology required to produce truly commercial digital cameras existed. The first true portable digital camera that recorded images as a computerized file was likely the Fuji DS-1P of 1988, which recorded to a 2 MB SRAM (static RAM) memory card that used a battery to keep the data in memory. This camera was never marketed to the public.

Digital SLRs (DSLRs) -:

Nikon was interested in digital photography since the mid-1980s. In 1986, while presenting to Photokina, Nikon introduced an operational prototype of the first SLR-type digital camera (Still Video Camera), manufactured by Panasonic.[48] The Nikon SVC was built around a sensor 2/3 ” charge-coupled device of 300,000 pixels. Storage media, a magnetic floppy inside the camera allows recording of 25 or 50 B&W images, depending on the definition.

Camera phones -:

The first commercial camera phone was the Kyocera Visual Phone VP-210, released in Japan in May 1999.[54] It was called a “mobile videophone” at the time,[55] and had a 110,000-pixel front-facing camera.[54] It stored up to 20 JPEG digital images, which could be sent over e-mail, or the phone could send up to two images per second over Japan’s Personal Handy-phone System (PHS) cellular network.