Time magazine profiled QuickTake as "the first consumer digital camera" and ranked it among its "100 greatest and most influential gadgets from 1923 to the present" list.

[2] Although the greyscale Dycam Model 1 (also marketed as the Logitech FotoMan) was the first consumer digital camera to be sold in the US (starting in November 1990)[3][4] and at least one other camera, the Fuji DS-X, was sold in Japan even earlier, in late 1989,[5] the QuickTake was probably the first digicam to have wide consumer acceptance.

[11][12] By October 1993, rumors of Venus and its capabilities had publicly tied Kodak, Apple, and Chinon together; the cost was anticipated to be relatively low compared to existing digital cameras.

[13] The QuickTake 100 was first shown at Tokyo MacWorld on February 17, 1994,[13] exhibited for the first time in America at the Photo Marketing Association trade show,[14] and released for sale on June 20 of that year.

[18] Two separate models (for Macintosh or Windows) were sold; the bundled software and serial cable were specific to the host computer's operating system, but the camera hardware itself was identical.

The bundled Apple QuickTake software was used to retrieve photographs from the camera's internal memory, providing basic editing tools (rotating, resizing, and cropping) and allowing the user to select a file format and color bit depth for export.

[22] The 150 uses the same hardware as the 100,[23] and the improved compression enabled the QuickTake 150 to capture 16 best-quality or 32 standard-quality images, with either quality level now stored at the full resolution of 640×480 in the 1MB of built-in storage.

[24][25] At the same time, Kodak introduced its DC40, which used a similar design and hardware as the QuickTake 150, but captured images at an increased resolution to a larger internal storage.

(for Windows)[26] and a separate close-up lens that changed the focus range to 10 to 14 inches (25 to 36 cm) and diffused the flash appropriately.

[27] Compared to the prior Kodak/Chinon-based models, the most noticeable change for the QuickTake 200 was an 1.8 in (46 mm) color LCD screen on the rear panel to preview stored photographs.

QuickTake cameras cannot be directly connected to Macintoshes running Mac OS X as these machines do not support the old Apple Serial protocol, but image files in the QTK format can still be decoded on modern operating systems using the open source program dcraw or the OS X application GraphicConverter.