Making a 1970's camera digital

The very first digital SLRs were made the same way: by replacing the film transport of a traditional camera with a digital back. Kodak did this with many camera models from Nikon and later Canon, all of them branded Kodak DCS [1]. The DCS 420 seems to me the most iconic, with a digital capture device exactly the same size as the original film body, bolted right on.

It took a decade for DSLRs to become truly integrated, no longer plausibly convertible back to film. During this time compact digital cameras were born, but not as conversions of 35mm compact cameras. Nikon went straight for the crazy with the Coolpix 900 (OK, they had an even weirder 100 model that no one bought); Sony had the Digital Mavica writing to floppy disks (!), and Canon went ultra-compact with the S10. All this back when Digital Photography Review was a tiny independent site with reviews written by one guy (yet always the biggest site of its kind).

We've come back around a bit, with Fuji's X10 bringing back not a true film camera but at least the aesthetic. Olympus, who made unconventional film cameras in the 70's and 80's, didn't miss a beat of their alternate drummer. Konica as used in this article merged with Minolta and then sold the camera business to Sony, so it's entirely fitting that a Konica film body be merged with Sony electronics.

And Kodak, well, RIP.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodak_DCS