Kodak
Born in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn, New York, Steve Sasson grew up with a keen interest in electronics. As a child, he designed and built radio receivers, stereo amplifiers and transmitters in his basement with salvaged electronic components from discarded televisions and radios. He attended the Brooklyn Technical High School, a specialized public high school in New York City, where he focused on technical and scientific studies. Sasson obtained a bachelors and a master’s degree in Electrical Engineering from Renesselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in Troy, New York. During his time at RPI, Steve’s first job in the CE industry was working as a draftsman for a consulting engineer in Little Falls, NJ.
He joined Eastman Kodak Co. in 1973 as an electrical engineer working in an applied research laboratory in the Apparatus Division. Sasson was given a broad assignment from his supervisor, Gareth A. Lloyd, to build a camera using solid-state imagers, a new type of electronic sensor known as a charge coupled device, which could capture optical information. Sasson went about constructing the digital circuitry from scratch, using oscilloscope measurements as a guide. For the rest of the camera, he made use of what was available to him at the time: an analog-to-digital converter from Motorola, a movie-camera photographic lens made by Kodak, and tiny CCD chips introduced in 1973 by Fairchild Semiconductor. The original prototype was eight pounds and about the size of a toaster. With a resolution of 0.01 megapixel, it recorded black and white digital images to a magnetic cassette tape. With this prototype model, Sasson took the first image in December of 1975 taking 23 seconds to capture it and forever changing the way the world takes photos.
Sasson continues to work for Kodak and during his tenure with the company has been involved in the development of Kodak's award-winning range of EasyShare thermal printer docks, commercialization of retail photo kiosks, the halftone proofer in the graphics market and advanced technologies in Kodak's professional range. Sasson also has played a role in Kodak’s developments in thermal printing.
In 2004 he moved to the Corporate Commercial Affairs (CCA) organization within Kodak where he served as the project manager for a major intellectual property litigation. He is presently working in the Intellectual Property Transactions (IPT) group at Kodak. In March 2007, Sasson received the "Visionary" award from the Photographic Manufacturers and Distributors Association (PMDA).
Sasson’s interest and devotion to electronics helped him to create the first prototype of a technology that has become a major commercial force and revolutionized the way the world takes pictures.