Roger Cicala: thank you so much for all these articles. During the last days I’ve spent endless fascinating hour reading your photography blog articles. They have all been interesting, but the camera and lens history parts have been just the best! Thank you so much for writing these excellent articles!

As for Foveon sensor theory: Foveon advertisement material shows a sensor where one layer captures pure blue, one pure green and one pure red colour. Unfortunately, this isn’t the truth. The topmost layer catches all wavelengths, but blue a bit more than the others. The next catches a bit more green than other wavelengths, and the bottom one pretty much the rest. This is a far cry from the clean colour separation you get with a Bayer filter. So, while Bayer is wasteful of photons, Foveon gives muted, unclean colours in the RAW file (and NO, I am NOT saying that you would ever see these brown colours in an actual photo: see below).

So the three elements in the Foveon sensor receive raw data that is far from “pure red, green, blue”. What follows is that colour separation has to be increased in RAW->JPEG / RAW->screen processing, and this is what causes colour noise and colour blotches at high ISO. This data is the result of both of what I have seen and from discussions with a guy in our company who actually has designed a working 35 mm X-ray sensitive sensor all by himself.

May I humbly offer up one more innovation?

Through The Lens (TTL) Flash Exposure Photography.

The Olympus OM-2 pioneered the Off-The-Film Metering system, which was initially designed by Minolta but licensed to Olympus (so they could do the real-world de-bugging of the system) and introduced in the OM-2. While the auto exposure system worked well (they tinkered with really mod-art silver patterns on the shutter curtains before realizing that light reflecting off the film emulsion was good enough), it was the TTL Flash that was “amazing”!

With TTL, the flash duration was determined by the camera’s light meter watching the light of the flash coming through the camera’s lens at the stopped-down shooting setting, and multiple flashes could be utilized, too. We were all flabbergasted, especially us macro guys using bellows setups.

Here’s my minor quibble for the “who invented what”:

Minolta brought autofocus to the mass market, but the Nikon F3 AF was available two years earlier, and multiple manufacturers had shown prototypes much earlier (E.g. Nikon: AF-Nikkor 4.5/80 on the Cicago Camera-Show 1971).

You might want to point out that film (i.e. getting past the collodion process) was a huge, major, vast improvement in photography and safety. Not only did the wet plate process require a portable darkroom (Matthew Brady had a specially built darkroom wagon which required two horses to pull), but collodion is a mixture of the explosive called gun cotton, mixed in the highly volatile, incredibly flammable chemical diethyl ether and flammable denatured alcohol-not the most user friendly ingredients! The explosions would have restricted photography to outdoor scenics-imagine the Secret Service letting the press photograph the president using a bunch of explosives and anesthetics, or having a portable darkroom filled with explosives and flammable materials on the sideline of a football game-the plates had to be used while wet, so you only had about 3 minutes from plate production to exposure.

Lastly, another consideration for your list. In 1959, Nikon (with the F) invented the first ‘system’ camera, designed from the beginning to have interchangeable lenses, interchangeable finders, interchangeable backs (polaroid, motor, long roll), locking-up mirror, interchangable everything but the shutter. Not only was this stuff interchangeable, but it allowed the basic camera to be upgraded (finders advanced from no meter to external meters to multiple TTL meters) and thus not go obsolete. Hasselblad, Canon, Mamaiya, Leica, and others eventually adopted all or most of these features, but it worked best in the Nikon F, as it was designed that way (no add-on reflex viewfinders as in the Leica Visoflex).