Logitech Fotoman FM-1 (1991)
It was Logitech, a company that has been making electronic peripherals for decades, that has the most legitimate claim on introducing the first consumer digital camera with its Fotoman FM-1 that even pre-dates the Kodak NC2000. It first went on sale in 1991 for $995 (the equivalent of $2,200+ if purchased today) which is surprisingly expensive even before you break down the camera’s awful specs.
The Fotoman FM-1’s design is reminiscent of the Nokia candy bar phones that once dominated our pockets, and it featured a tiny 0.15MP sensor that could only capture 376×240 images in grayscale; squeezing up to 32 of them onto its 1MB of onboard storage. But somehow a lack of color wasn’t the biggest challenge of using this digital camera. The Fotoman’s digital memory required a constant source of power to store images, so if you hadn’t backed up your shots before its batteries died, they would be gone forever.
