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Last week, a friend tracked down and rescued a box of old cameras just days before they were to be trashed. In that box was a Tactical Camera (the second DSLR), and a Hawkeye II Integrated camera (the first Nikon body DSLR).

These cameras had been in a display case at Kodak's Hawkeye Plant for a long time, but had disappeared several years ago. We are delighted to have found them.

I've added lots of new photos of these cameras to the http://eocamera.jemcgarvey.com site. Included are sample images from the Hawkeye II, which I was able to get working.

The cameras will be in the George Eastman House collection on Monday, to be preserved safely.

I will be adding more documents and text to the site in the future, but for now, enjoy the photos!

Thanks so much for making this information available to us Jim.

Hi,

Hey! That Canon F1 based unit was the thing Kodak brought to IBM Kingston (NY) to show off the imager they were trying to sell us on for an automated PC board production vision system.

The idea was that you'd take a shot of a perfect board and load it into a computer. Then, as the line ran there would be a shot of every board at the end of the line, and that shot would be compared to the reference one. Matching boards would pass-on the main conveyor, those that didn't would go to a shunt conveyor to a repair tech. No more human Mark-I Eyeball quality vision units needed!!

Anyway, the Kodak guys brought that Canon F1 with the imager in it hooked to a box and we were shooting everything in the conference room with it. That was the day I wanted to get my own DSLR.

Oh, yes. We bought it. Not as a Canon F1 DSLR, but the imager in a case with a fixed lens. It worked pretty well, but it would pass-on bad boards sometimes, so we still had to use Mark-I Eyeball units, just not as many of them....

It's a cool thing to have around for history, but I don't think I'll trade my DCS760c for one!

Later!

Stan

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Amateur Photographer
Professional Electronics Development Engineer

Was the "imager in a case with a fixed lens" possibly the Videk Megaplus machine vision camera? It was the first commercial device with the M1 megapixel sensor. It was a digital camera, but had to be connected to a computer. It was available around the time we did the first DSLRs.

Hi,

That looks familiar! Yes, the vision systems were cameras plugged into computers. They used a stored 'good' image of what a populated board looked like, then snapped each board as it passed down the line and compared it to the 'good' reference. If we had a pass, the board went on. If we had a fail, then the board shunted to another conveyer to a repair technician to correct what was seen as incorrect.

Common as point & shoot digicams today. Ground breaking as the prototype DSLRs were back then. We used to have humans use the Mark-I Eyeball before, and they tend to miss things even when it happens to be obvious, or flag things that are fine, but 'just don't look right'. Depends on the individual, of course. Computers don't have that particular problem. They have the GIGO (see below) problem, but that's a different thread!

Later!

Stan

Garbage In, Garbage Out, of course!

_________________
Amateur Photographer
Professional Electronics Development Engineer

Wow,
what a lovely webcam!



Kiu

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