According to Wikipedia, a French inventor, Joseph Niepce, created the first known photograph in 1826. He used a pewter plate coated with a form of bitumen which would darken and harden on exposure to light. The bitumen which had the least exposure remained soft and could be washed away using white petroleum. This produced a positive image.
Slightly over ten years later, this technique was replaced with silver on a copper plate. This was followed by the development of negatives on glass plates.
Up until the mid-1800s, the pinhole camera was the lead technology of the day. Essentially, a small pin-sized hole was made on one side of a dark box and an inverted image was created on the opposite side where a photographic plate captured the image. In 1847, Count Levitsky, created the bellows camera which permitted better focussing of the image on the photographic plate.
The birth of photography for the masses, came in 1884 when George Eastman of Rochester, NY, developed the first paper film using a dry gel. It was wound around a removable spool which could be moved using an external lever to position the next part of the film for exposure when the shutter button was pressed.
Further refinements followed until the Kodak Box Brownie made its debut in 1900. It came with the slogan: “You press the button, we do the rest”. It consisted of a small box with a simple lens and a price of $1.00, which I suppose in those days was a reasonable amount of money but still made the camera affordable for the masses.
Different models of the Box Brownie continued to be manufactured and it remained one of the most popular cameras over the next 55 years, right up until the mid-1950s.
Believe it or not, inventors were experimenting with colour from the 1860s through to the 1880s, however, the first practical colour plate did not make its appearance until 1907. Colour photography remained plate-based until the introduction of a multilayered colour film in 1936 under the trade name Kodachrome.
Polaroid introduced the instant colour camera in 1963 and I still have one lying around in a box somewhere!
Digital cameras rely on the charge-coupled device (CCD) which was invented in Bell Labs in 1969. This device could create digital images.
In simple terms, a Charge Couple Device (CCD) is the chip that resides in your camera and it records the brightness of the picture as well as the colours. The size of this chip determines the quality of the picture which is produced.
Most low end consumer cameras have only one CCD whereas high-end consumer cameras (often called “prosumer”) and professional cameras feature 3 CCDs; one for each of the primary colours (red, green, blue) and you will get a much higher quality.
The CCDs with the highest pixel counts will produce the best images. Of course, don’t forget the quality of the lens, because if you have a poorly made lens, you are not going to get the quality you need! In this respect, Karl Zeiss lenses have developed an excellent reputation and are used on many higher end cameras.