Believe it or not, non-chemical cameras have only existed for 30 years — and true digital cameras that store files as JPEGs and MPEGs have been around for just 20 years.

After last week’s Lytro announcement, we found ourselves thinking about the major advances and innovations that have shaped digital photography. It’s been a crazy ride, after all! From CCDs to CMOS, from the first DSLR that required a shoulder-carried auxiliary unit to the first point-and-shoot with a built-in LCD TFT screen, and from cameras that had 1MB of volatile RAM to the invention of CompactFlash and removable storage. At the end of the slideshow, we’ll also cover the latest emerging technologies that look set to change the landscape of digital photography yet again.

Without further ado, the very first commercial, electronic camera: the Sony Mavica. It featured digital circuitry, but it did not take digital images in today’s sense. Basically, it was a video camera that captured single NTSC frames at a resolution of 570 x 490 using a CCD. The images were stored in analog form on “video floppy” disks in much the same way that you could record an NTSC television signal on VHS tape. Each video floppy could store just 25 still images, and you could only view them on a television screen.