Electronically controlled cameras

b 986 electronically controlled cameras When Daguerre laid the foundations of photogra- phy in 1839, he also started the development of the photographic camera. For more than a hundred years, the camera re- mained a purely mechan- ical device. From a cumbersome square box with a fixed lens, it slowly turned into a small and handy piece of precision engineering, that offered more and more facilities. It is only relatively recently that electronics began to be used in cameras. True, the exposure meter of thirty, forty years ago used a selenium cell and a very sensitive moving coil meter. For many years this type of exposure meter was the only photo- graphic aid that used electronics. Later there fol- lowed the CdS exposure meter, and by this time it had become small enough to be built into the camera. But true elec- tronic components were then -some twenty years ago- still too large to be fitted inside a camera. It was only when the tran- sistor became miniatur- ized and integra...