Digital Photography Takes Off

In the early days of digital image capture—quite recently, compared to the long tradition of film—the main problem was the limit on the amount of information the chip could capture. “The earlier models did not have the resolution to capture the data correctly,” recalls Manny Akis, president of Akis Productions, a photography studio, based in Hackensack, NJ, that offers both film and digital workflows. Akis and his studio have watched this technology emerge and, in 1994, found a camera worthy of their standards. The first digital scanning back camera Akis felt was worthy of capturing enough information to warrant the sale of the service was from Dicomed, Burnsville, MN, and employed a charge-coupled device (CCD) in a linear array. This technology, attached to the back of a camera, works much like a scanner.