Apple QuickTake 100 (1994)

Next >

The coming to life of the Apple QuickTake 100 is quite remarkable and I'd like to repeat some of that information here. In 1990 Kodak had a strong business relationship with Apple, so Ken Parulski and a team of Kodak managers and engineers, traveled to Cupertino, California, to discuss mutual digital-imaging capabilities. They returned in 1992 with a Kodak sensor and a prototype. Apple did the industrial design and revealed it in 1994 as the Apple QuickTake 100. Announced officially by Apple on 1994-02-17. The rest of this amazing story can be read in the history section under the topic 1994 - Children of different parents.

The QT 100 was the first truly affordable digital camera that could easily be connected to a computer and was mass produced next to the Logitech Fotoman. The QT 100 was $200 cheaper than the Fotoman and recorded directly in true color. As with the Fotoman it could only record a small number of 8 pictures in 24-bit color VGA resolution (or 32 in 8-bit QVGA resolution). Few only know that the Kodak sensor used in this camera was an off-shoot of Kodak's DCS-200 camera. The camera had a well shaped form and buttons were easily reachable. The connectors were placed under a sliding cover which was way better than the rubber covers that often went missing on other digital cameras.

The QT 100 is an easy to use point-and-shoot digital camera with an optical viewfinder and a status LCD and built for eternity. All of the QT 100 I've encountered so far still work to this very day! There was one big difference to the Fotoman though because the Fotoman stored it's images in volatile RAM and the QT 100 in EPROM flash which means that the pictures were not lost when the batteries depleted (Apple claimed that they would stay in memory for over up to one year without battery power). The camera was launched while Steve Jobs was absent from Apple and upon his return he canned the entire digital camera production.

When the QuickTake 150 came out, QT 100 owners could send theirs in and have it upgraded to a QT 100 Plus for the modest price of $200. Oh and it's a common mistakes on websites that Apple invented the QuickTake 100 as you can read from my history section.

The depicted QT 100 on this site can be seen with the close-up lens that came with the QuickTake 150 and which could be purchased through the Apple upgrade package!