Poynting Products FS-2505 (1984)

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In 1984 Poynting Products successfully combined a GE TN-2505 CCD camera with a DRAM memory module, producing what could be one of the first commecially available digital cameras with flash storage capabilities. Back in those days the GE TN-2505 was a popular CCD camera for machine vision applications and scientific purposes. In order to get an image out of it, one had to hook it up with a frame grabber that was built into a computer. This was the general process. Poynting Products however too the TN-2505, added an 8 bit digital video frame memory module to it and extended the housing. They commercially sold it as the Poynting Products FS-2505 Digital Freeze Frame Camera.  (FS stands for Frame Store).

They sold these to printing and mailing firms for strobe illuminated image acquisition of their rapidly moving products. The price at that time was $4,000. The FS-2505 may therefore be the first commercially marketed, standard format (RS-170) video camera with built in digital  memory. The video output was continuously generated from the digital memory and freeze frame capability was provided by disabling writes to the digital memory.