The 30 Most Important Digital Cameras Of All Time

Digital photography has proven to be one of the most world-changing technological breakthroughs of the late 20th century. But the quest to capture and transmit images via electrons began nearly two centuries ago.

Piece by piece, the technologies that would make digital imaging possible fell into place. By the 80s, 'still video' cameras captured analog images via a semiconductor array invented at Bell Labs in 1969: the charge-coupled device, or CCD. Which brings us to the first of these, the most important digital cameras of all time.