Dean McCormack Peterson (1931–2004) was an American inventor, responsible for two of consumer photography's largest revolutions: the Kodak Instamatic camera, introduced in 1963, and the panoply of "point-and-shoot" cameras introduced in the late 1970s. Both of these inventions had a huge impact on consumer photography, and nearly every snapshot taken since the mid-1960s, and virtually every photo of any kind since the 1980s, have benefited from Peterson's pioneering work.