Digital Camera Backs - A Brief History.

A digital camera back is a high-end digital photography instrument. Most digital cameras are built as a single unit, especially the case within the lower end market where the cameras usually have lenses and flashes that can not be changed. However, at the highest end, the solutions used are completely modular, with interchangeable lenses, camera bodies, and film backs. A digital camera back essentially replaces a film back in such a system. Usually photographers who practice photography for a living use professional medium format cameras such as Hasselblad, Mamiya, Leaf AFi , Bronica, Contax or a view camera such as Sinar, Arca Swiss or Linhof.

The first digital camera back was introduced by Leaf Photography (now part of Kodak) in 1991. The Leaf DCB1, nicknamed ‘The Brick’, offered a resolution of 4 million pixels (MP). It took another four years of development to then introduce the 2nd digital camera; the DCBII, which included a live-vode0 view. Two years later, in 1996, Leaf introduced the first 6MP digital camera back; the Leaf Volare. From 2002, new models were introduced yearly, with rising resolution and sensor sizes, achieving today resolutions of 33MP for the new Leaf Aptus family of digital camera backs, and 39MP for Phase One and Hasselblad.

Early digital camera backs were only used in a studio to take pictures of still objects. This was due to the sheer amount of data that is captured and somehow stored onto a computer with enough space meaning the camera had to be tethered to a computer. The technology at the time encompassed a linear array sensor which would take seconds or even minutes for a complete high-resolution scan. The latest one-shot digital camera backs from Leaf, Phase One, Hasselblad and Sinar, however, can keep pace with the speediest motorized medium format cameras, and they are for all practical purposes without limitations to the available shutter speeds. The availability of high-speed, high capacity memory cards have made modern digital camera backs into self-contained units, which makes them practical for use outside the studio as well.

Since it is much easier to manufacture a high-quality linear CCD array that has only a few thousand pixels than a CCD matrix that has millions of them, very high resolution linear CCD digital camera backs were available much earlier than their CCD matrix counterparts. For example, you could buy an expensive digital camera back with an over 7000 pixel horizontal resolution in the mid-1990s. As of 2006, you can buy a comparable CCD matrix camera of similar resolution, in the Phase One P45, Sinar Emotion 75 and in the Leaf Aptus 75 (and now Aptus 54S, 65S and 75S) digital camera backs.

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Digital Camera Backs - A Brief History.