The *First* digital SLR sold in Washington State

The *First* digital SLR sold in Washington State


Image by ttstam
I picked up today a copy stand from a gentleman on Craigslist. It is a Canon professional model – very heavy duty. It’ll be perfect for the documentation / scientific shots that I do as well as for digitizing the mess of paperwork that is cluttering my office. (Lightroom library for bills, anyone? ).

Anyway, the gentleman who sold me the copy stand was a retired professional photographer and also used to teach photography at Edmonds Community College. This is one of the cameras in his little "museum".

It is probably the first ever Digital SLR sold in Washington state, purchased in the early 1990s from Glazer’s camera. It appeared to be built from a Nikon F-series professional body. (The lens mounted is a Nikkor 85 f1.4 I think). The camera back had been removed, and a digital "35mm" back added. back then they didn’t have full frame sensors, so it’s actually a smaller than-APS-C sensor on a 35mm back (Crop factor of 2.something). The optics train for the reflex-mirror and pentaprism are stock 35mm format; so the viewfinder recticle has an inner crop circle denoting the limits of the sensor frame. "It was the ONLY way we could use these things back then, given the crop factor…"

Of course, this was years before compact flash standard was established; in fact, back then solid state memory would have made this ungodly expensive. The lower portion of the digital back contains an 80Mb hard drive and a DB-25 SCSI connector.

A Quantum Battery provides the power to this thing – this won’t even work without an external battery pack. And if you put a strobe on it, it’ll require a second quantum pack to power the strobe.

I’ll be making arrangements to go back and get more pictures of this camera (and some of his other toys) to share…

(And, it still works. Sad thing is they no longer make drivers to support this – but since it’s a SCSI device I’m wondering if we can mount the drive in a Linux box? Something to ponder…

Edited to add:

It appears to be built on a Nikon 8808 body. 1.5 Megapixel, 2.6x (not a typo!) crop factor. Oh, and although this *IS* a color version, there is a (pressumably cheaper) monochrome version as well; to shoot color, you shoot 3 shots through a color wheel and combine the channels to form a colored image.

More information here:

www.mir.com.my/rb/photography/companies/Kodak/index.htm

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Tags: Digital, first, sold, State, Washington