“Well, you know, I was raised on Star Trek, and all the good ideas come from Star Trek. So I said what if we could just do it all electronically? What if I could store an image electronically, capture an image electronically, and I don’t require any film at all?” … “I wanted to build a camera with no moving parts. Now that was just to annoy the mechanical engineers. Most cameras at the time were mechanical marvels, and I couldn’t build a mechanical camera to save my life. So I thought, since these guys are the cream of the crop, I’ll just make one with no moving parts, and that’ll annoy the hell out of them.”
Love that an aversion to chemicals and inspiration from Star Trek was the founding moment of the digital camera.
Quote Citation: Stephen Dowling, “A ’toaster with a lens’: The story behind the first handheld digital camera”, Dec 17, 2025, https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20251205-how-the-handheld-digital-camera-was-born