Minolta RD-175
The Minolta RD-175 (also sold as the Agfa Actioncam) was one of the first digital SLR cameras. When Minolta introduced this camera in 1995 it did cost a very huge amount - around $10,000. At that time the Minolta engineers used a costly trick to get good colour pictures in 1.75 mega-pixel resolution: The light which got through the lens had to be ripped into red, green and blue light parts[1]. Each part was projected onto its own [[CCD|CCD light-sensor]. So the camera included 3 CCDs which worked together for making colour pictures. The CCDs had a resolution of 768 x 494 pixels, which was interpolated out to 1,528 x 1,146. The resulting 1.75 megapixel images were stored on a PCMCIA type III hard disk card.
The handling of the camera was almost like that of other autofocus SLR cameras of the time, and the lenses for this camera were simply the same as the ones for Minolta's Maxxum/Dynax/alpha camera bodies. The picture quality, once praised, is far behind that of Konica Minolta's digital SLRs with 6 mega-pixel resolution.
- ↑ Possibly not RGB, but two green + one red/blue
Links
- RD-175/Agfa Actioncam review by John Henshall
- Agfa Actioncam on Jarle Aasland's NikonWeb.com site
