How Digital Cameras Work - Their Ins and Outs

The digital camera is one of the most remarkable instances of evolution in electronics. This is more so because a digital camera is very different from its predecessors, the conventional cameras. Conventional cameras depend entirely on chemical and mechanical processes -- you don't even need electricity to operate them. On the other hand, all digital cameras have a built-in computer, and all of them record images electronically.

How They Work

The new approach has been enormously successful. So it is necessary to understand how digital cameras work.

Let's say you want to take a picture and e-mail it to a friend. To do this, you need the image to be represented in the language that computers recognize -- bits and bytes. Essentially, a digital image is just a long string of 1s and 0s that represent all the tiny colored dots -- or pixels -- that collectively make up the image. In this situation the process of how digital cameras work can be observed in two basic conditions.

The first condition is that you can take a photograph using a conventional film camera, process the film chemically, print it onto photographic paper and then use a digital scanner to sample the print. Or better still, you can directly sample the original light that bounces off your subject, immediately breaking that light pattern down into a series of pixel values -- in other words, you can use a digital camera.

In the concept of how digital cameras work the important factor to taken under consideration is that how the image is stored When you take a picture with a digital camera the light strikes a digital sensor array, instead of a piece of film. These digital sensors are computer "chips" with names like CCD, CMOS, Foveon, or others. They take the place of a piece of film that must be moved across the focal plane of the camera. The digital sensor is made of millions of tiny sensor points called "pixels," which is short for "picture elements."

Think of megapixels as millions of dots of light that are being stored for each picture. The more dots of light there are, the higher the resolution of the image. More pixel dots = bigger pictures. Usually, the more megapixels the better! It takes a lot of mega pixels to make prints on photo paper, so it would be best to get a camera with as many mega pixels as you can afford this concept of mega pixels is also necessary in the working of digital camera




Next important factor in how digital cameras work is printing digital image, to make a nice 4x6 inch print will require a camera of at least two megapixels. To go up to an 8x10, or 11x14 inches, it is best to have a four to six mega pixel camera. Of course, an image processor can make the smaller mega pixel cameras do larger prints by stretching the image a bit. This is a process called "interpolation," which simply means adding extra dots of light (pixels) to make the image larger. Image quality degrades a bit when this happens, but is generally acceptable.

These all are some factors that should be taken under consideration when discussing about how digital cameras work.