Steven Sasson, the man who invented the camera gave a talk to my program (CE at Rochester Institute of Tech) about the process and downfall of his invention at

Steven Sasson, the man who invented the camera gave a talk to my program (CE at Rochester Institute of Tech) about the process and downfall of his invention at Kodak. It all started as some backroom research project with no funding to see if they could do something with the new technology of CDC cells. The camera ended up at .01 Megapixels and stored on a tape (with about 20+ second write time). What most people did not realize is he also made a device for displaying the image onto a TV (what good is a digital image if there is no way to display it). IIRC the first "public" demo of this technology was during the Tiananmen Square Massacre to smuggle/transmit the video out of the county. If you watch one of the original broadcasts the only sign of it was a little Kodak logo at the bottom of the screen. Now there is something you need to know about film.... it was probably one of the most profitable products ever. Also Kodak was not really a pure technology company, it was more of a consumer tech/chemical company. While they did have a lot of engineers (many of my professors all worked there), some were more focused on the manufacturing process rather than an end product. A lot of their internal structure was focused on making and processing chemical film. When he showed this product to the upper level (however never the CEO) the demo went something like: walk into room with the camera, take picture of attendees, show picture on TV. While this was totally unheard of the time, mostly they all just laughed at the quality of the image and brushed it off. They also saw no appeal in viewing pictures on a TV screen vs an actual picture. A patent was filed and that was mostly the end of it. A lot of people laugh at Kodak for that mistake, but it really it’s just another example of the inventors dilemma. At that time though it made perfect sense for Kodak to make that decision because they were just making so much money. One could say the technology was ahead of its time. Well then digital really started to take rise. They ended up turning a lot of their focus into making personal photo printers. In 2004 Kodak then realized that almost every company that made a digital camera infringed on their patents and started to sue them all. They ended up winning a lot of money but they could never get their foot back into the market. TLDR: Camera was ahead of its time and threatened to undo the whole company whose main focus was producing and processing chemical film.