Rise of the Digital Camera

There was a time when digital cameras were regarded as a quirky gadget but not a serious camera. Then there was a time when the cameras were OK but not remotely affordable. Then sometime in the last ten years or so we find ourselves choosing digital compact cameras and DSLRs as our default camera of choice.

The next generation will look at us like a penny farthing riding relic of the Victorian era when we tell them about taking pictures without seeing the image, taking them to Boots to get developed and then finding half of them cam back blurred with 'advisory' stickers on them. So how did digital cameras take over the world?

One measure of their development, although not the only measure of quality of course, is the number of pixels in a camera image. They've come a long way since the first digital camera in a Kodak lab took a 10,000 pixel digital picture and stored it on a cassette.

Source: here

Nowadays you're looking at relatively affordable cameras which can take twenty or thirty million pixel images. The following graph shows the rise in pixel count over the years, using some landmark cameras of the day to illustrate the rate of improvement:

Source: figures from here and here (click graph to EMBIGGEN)

It should be pointed out that these days you can get a 41 megapixel camera on a phone - that's how far we've come in such a short space of time.