Texas Instruments designed a filmless analog camera in 1972, but it is not known if it was ever built. The first recorded attempt at building a digital camera was by Steve Sasson, an engineer at Eastman Kodak. It used the then-new solid state CCD chips developed by Fairchild Semiconductor in 1973. The camera weighed 8 pounds (3.6 kg), recorded black and white images to a cassette tape, had a resolution of 0.01 megapixel (10,000 pixels), and took 23 seconds to capture its first image in December of 1975. The prototype camera was a technical exercise, not intended for production, and it still existed as of 2005. Digital cameras, in the sense of a device meant to be carried and used like a handheld film camera, appeared in 1981 with the demonstration of the Sony Mavica (Magnetic Video Camera). This is not to be confused with the later cameras by Sony that also bore the Mavica name. This was an analog camera based on television technology that recorded to a 2 × 2 inch "video floppy". In essence it was a video movie camera that recorded single frames, 50 per disk in field mode and 25 per disk in frame mode. The image quality was considered equal to that of then-current televisions. Analog cameras do not appear to have reached the market until 1986 with the Canon RC-701. Canon demonstrated this model at the 1984 Olympics, printing the images in newspapers. Several factors held back the widespread adoption of analog cameras; the cost (upwards of $20,000), poor image quality compared to film, and the lack of quality affordable printers. Capturing and printing an image originally required access to equipment such as a frame grabber, which was beyond the reach of the average consumer. The "video floppy" disks later had several reader devices available for viewing on a screen, but were never standardized as a computer drive. The early adopters tended to be in the news media, where the cost was negated by the utility and the ability to transmit images by telephone lines. The poor image quality was offset by the low resolution of newspaper graphics. This capability to transmit images without a satellite link was useful during the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 and the first Gulf War in 1991. The first analog camera marketed to consumers may have been the Canon RC-250 Xapshot in 1988. A notable analog camera produced the same year was the Nikon QV-1000C, which sold approximately 100 units.[citation needed] It recorded images in greyscale, and the quality in newspaper print was equal to film cameras. In appearance it closely resembled a modern digital single-lens reflex camera.

Texas Instruments designed a filmless analog camera in 1972, but it is not known if it was ever built. The first recorded attempt at building a digital camera was by Steve Sasson, an engineer at Eastman Kodak. It used the then-new solid state CCD chips developed by Fairchild Semiconductor in 1973. The camera weighed 8 pounds (3.6 kg), recorded black and white images to a cassette tape, had a resolution of 0.01 megapixel (10,000 pixels), and took 23 seconds to capture its first image in December of 1975. The prototype camera was a technical exercise, not intended for production, and it still existed as of 2005.

I think the first digital camera that achieved any real market penetration was Apple's QuickTake cameras back in 1994. It was also the first reasonably affordable digital camera that used today's common arrangement of onboard media card, small LCD screen on the back of the camera and a serial connection to a computer. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_QuickTake

Eugene F. Lally of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory/Caltech in 1961 had a paper published by the American Rocket Society titled "Mosaic Guidance for Interplanetary Travel". It was the first digital camera design ever presented. It consisted of a mosaic focal plane of tiny light detectors that formed photos of planets and stars on a manned spacecraft following a trajectory to Mars. The information was to be used by the crew for guidance and navigation information self generated inside the spacecraft rather then using the traditional radio position information obtained from earth tracking stations combined with onboard inertial information. This concept was referenced and applied in 1972 when the technology caught up with Lally's concept and initial prototype digital camera were researched.

John Sasson was the creaor of the first camera it was an eight pound conraption and took 23 seconds to take the picture

i think that Layla Galozo invented the first digital camera in 1999,but it didn't sell well