Steven Sasson

American electrical engineer and inventor of the portable digital camera

Steven J. Sasson (born July 4, 1950) is an American electrical engineer and the inventor of the self contained (portable) digital camera. He joined Kodak shortly after his graduation from engineering school and retired from Kodak in 2009. He attended and graduated from Brooklyn Technical High School. He is a 1972 (BS) and 1973 (MS) graduate of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in electrical engineering.

Steven Sasson developed a portable, battery operated, self contained digital camera at Kodak in 1975. It weighed and used a Fairchild CCD image sensor having only 100 × 100 pixels (0.01 megapixels). The images were digitally recorded onto a cassette tape, a process that took 23 seconds per image. His camera took images in black and white. As he set out on his design project, what he envisioned for the future was a camera without mechanical moving parts (although his device did have moving parts, such as the tape drive). In 1977, Kodak filed a patent application on some features of Sasson's prototype camera. Titled "electronic still camera", the patent listed Sasson and Gareth Lloyd as co inventors. The issued patent, U. S. patent number 4,131,919. claims an arrangement that allows the CCD to be read out quickly ("in real time") into a temporary buffer of random access memory, and then written to storage at the lower speed of the storage device. Most modern digital cameras still use such an arrangement, which was also described in an earlier MIT patent that employed a vidicon sensor rather than a CCD. His prototype was not the first camera that produced digital images, but it was the first hand held digital camera. which took digital photographs of Yosemite before it was launched in 1972, as well as cameras used for astronomical photography, experimental devices by Michael Francis Tompsett et al., and the commercial product and hobbyist camera called the Cromemco Cyclops.

His work on digital cameras began in 1975 with a broad assignment from his supervisor at Eastman Kodak Company, Gareth A. Lloyd: to attempt to build an electronic camera using a commercially available charge coupled device (CCD). The resulting camera invention was awarded the U. S. patent number 4,131,919. On November 17, 2009, U. S. President Barack Obama awarded Sasson the National Medal of Technology and Innovation at a ceremony in the East Room of the White House. This is the highest honor awarded by the US government to scientists, engineers, and inventors. On September 6, 2012 The Royal Photographic Society awarded Sasson its Progress Medal and Honorary Fellowship "in recognition of any invention, research, publication or other contribution that has resulted in an important advance in the scientific or technological development of photography or imaging in the widest sense." Leica Camera AG honored Sasson by presenting to him a limited edition 18 megapixel Leica M9 Titanium camera at the Photokina 2010 trade show event. Sasson was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2011, and later elected as a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors in 2018.