A Look Back at the Best Digital Cameras of 1995

In 1975, the Internet didn’t exist, smartphones didn’t exist, wafer-thin laptops were a pipedream, and if you were a photographer, you shot film. Thanks to a Kodak employee named Steven Sasson, all this was about to change. By hacking parts of an old Kodak Super 8 movie camera together with a half dozen or so circuit boards and a 2MP monochrome CCD sensor, Sasson created what is recognized as the first working digital camera. Though considered more of a curiosity than an industry game changer early on, photographers began reckoning with the fact that digital cameras were going to be altering the way they went about doing business as photographers.

1995

Fast-forward 20 years to 1995, and digital cameras had begun nipping at the heels of analog photographers. Though technically crude and awfully expensive compared to the digital dynamos we take for granted these days, digital cameras slowly gained the confidence of photographers, and more importantly, among ad agency art buyers, photography editors, and others who purchased and commissioned photographers for editorial, corporate, and advertising projects. Once these folks were on board, there was no turning back.
As with all early technologies, digital imaging was akin to the wild west when it came to file formats, storage formats, cable connections, image transfer protocols, and compatibility between products produced by different manufacturers. Software, firmware, and compatibility issues? Don’t ask.