Camera, Digital Zoom, Kodak, DC4800

This Kodak Model DC4800 Zoom Digital camera, introduced in 2000, represents a typical consumer-friendly digital camera at the end of the 20th Century. Instead of film it employs a solid state 2160 x 1440 pixel CCD. This number of pixels exceeds that of many CCD's used on earlier astronomical instruments, and so the camera is displayed for two reasons. First it shows the rapid advance of the technology, and second it symbolizes the ubiquity of this new technology. The camera is displayed partially disassembled to reveal the CCD and some of the associated electronics required to construct a picture from the signal that flows from the CCD. The camera was donated to NASM by the Eastman Kodak Company in 2000 and is now on display in the Explore the Universe Gallery.