Like autofocus technology, one of the most important developments in photography did not come from the camera industry. Nor will the next one.
The guts of today’s digital cameras were invented by a couple of guys working for the phone company. Earlier this month, Willard Boyle and George Smith were awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics for their invention of the CCD, or Charge-Coupled Device, at AT&T’s famous Bell Labs in 1969. They developed a practical application for Albert Einstein’s theory (for which he won the Nobel in 1921) that light could be transformed into electric signals.
And the CCD can now be found in the vast majority of digital cameras (although CMOS, which uses a somewhat different technology, is gaining). Ironically, some of those digital cameras are also cell phones. Eat your heart out, Ma Bell!
Litigation for fun and profit
Although camera makers struggle to innovate, the most important innovations seem to come from non-photographic companies. Honeywell, for instance, developed autofocus technology—an idea which Minolta was convicted of stealing to become the first camera maker to produce an autofocus camera. When’s the last time you saw a Honeywell autofocus camera? I didn’t think so…but Minolta is out of the camera business (sigh), mainly because Honeywell successfully sued their pants off, and was awarded hundreds of millions of dollars in damages.
Bell Labs, apparently, must have been somewhat more civil in sharing Boyle and Smith’s discovery with the photographic world, because last time I checked, nobody has been sued for putting a CCD in a digital camera.
Interestingly, many refinements to digital cameras have come from independent companies that are not at all connected with the camera makers. Applied Science Fiction (great company name!), before it was bought by Kodak, pioneered the elimination of dust and scratches from scanned photos. Tessera’s FotoNation has been developing Face Recognition and several other innovations, but Tessera’s area of specialization is miniaturization of electronics components. Not (until recently) photography.
You wouldn’t recognize AT&T now, nor, for that matter, Bell Labs. As part of the breakup of the phone company monopoly, AT&T and Bell Labs have long parted ways, and AT&T’s research has been pared down drastically. Bell Labs has been forced to tighten its belt, and research is now more specifically product driven, and not driven by pure scientific discovery as it was in its glory days.
Eyes on Academia
So where is research going on now that could lead to future image-making breakthroughs? Probably not from the leaner, meaner and less R&D-friendly corporate world. It is more likely that it will probably come from academia. From MIT to the Weitzman Institute in Rehovot, Israel to Stanford University, researchers are developing refocusing technology, modular “open system” cameras, the ability to un-blur photos and many other potentially game-changing features using computational imaging technology.
But when they make their breakthroughs, will the camera manufacturers be there to quickly adopt, or will they take it slow, as they did with the gradual roll-out of digital photography, or will they take it stealthily, as Minolta did, to their detriment? That question is more than academic.
That's a wrap--have a great weekend, and see you next week at Photo Plus Expo!
