How Digital Cameras Work



If you are wondering how digital cameras work, maybe we can shed some light upon the situation with this short article here. The digital camera was probably one of the best inventions since French fries. It is pretty simple to explain the basics about how digital cameras work. A digital image is composed of small colored dots which are generally called pixels and when they are added up, they form the picture that you took.





Just like you see in a conventional camera, a digital camera is also composed of lenses which can be focused to get a better picture of the scenery. Since regular cameras focus the light to get an image of the scene and then it is placed on a piece of film, the digital camera works a bit different. There is a computer that breaks the pieces of electronic information into digital data. I am sure that a lot of you have heard about digital camera resolution but what is this resolution and what is it useful for? Resolution is a term which stands for the amount of detail that a digital camera can capture. The most common types of resolution are: 256 x 256 (found on real cheap cameras), 640 x 480 (great resolution for e-mailing pictures), 1216 x 912 (good resolution for printing pictures), 1600 x 1200 (a high resolution), 2240 x 1680 (this is considered to be the current standard) and 4026 x 2704 (this is the resolution found on top of the line and expensive digital cameras). The higher the resolution, the more expensive the digital camera will be.




In the past years, digital cameras came with a fixed amount of storage space inside the camera where you could “pile up” all your favorite pictures. In our days, digital cameras come with some internal memory plus the possibility to expand that memory by using certain memory cards, depending on what your digital camera can support. Depending on the resolution supported by each camera and the resolution of the pictures taking, they can occupy less or more space on the memory available. When a picture has a lot of pixels, it will eat up a lot of free space. Most of the digital cameras available on the market will store your pictures in the JPEG file format.



One thing which is particularly curious is that when a digital camera takes pictures, it is basically colorblind. It cannot tell right from the beginning of it’s yellow or purple or orange. The camera will only keep track of the intensity of the light that strikes its surface. After that, the sensors will use filtering in order to look at the light in red, blue and yellow, the primary colors. The next step required the camera to record all those colors and combine them in order to create the full spectrum. Did you ever imagine that digital cameras could be this smart? There could be a lot more of explaining to do, but there are the basic things you should know about how digital cameras work.

These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
  • TwitThis
  • Reddit
  • del.icio.us
  • StumbleUpon
  • Mixx

Comments

(required)

(will not be published/required)

(required)