How A Digital Camera Works

It's perfectly normal to ask "how a digital camera works". Despite all the hoo-hah, digital cameras retain many similarities in the way that they work to traditional cameras.

The common factors between them are the lens and the shutter. The shutters control the amount of light inside the camera.

There the similarity between digital and traditional film cameras more or less ends. The fundamental difference between digital and traditional cameras is that a traditional camera captures the images on a film, while the images captured through a digital camera remain on what is known as an image sensor.

Made up of an array of electrodes (or photosites) Image sensors are electronic devices designed to measure light intensity.

The Charge-Coupled Devices (CCD) are the most common type of image sensor in use for digital cameras. Other alternatives are the CMOS and Foveon.

The digital camera’s power is defined by the number of photosites in the image sensor. These are known as mega pixels (millions of pixels) A mega pixel corresponds to a photosite.

In simpler terms, a camera which is rated as having six mega pixels of power may well have an image sensor capable of containing 3008 pixels in width multiplied by 2000 pixels in height.

The technology of digital image capture comes into play, when light enters the digital camera through opening the shutter.

As soon as that light hits the image sensor, it undergoes a form of conversion from an analog-to-digital (A/D) image.

The A/D converter allows the processing of images captured and stores them on the computer’s memory card.

These are the basic technologies behind how a digital camera works, and are generally sufficient for a layman to understand the processes behind the operation of a digital camera.

Those people who are more curious to discover more about the whole process of capturing analog images and sounds and transferring them to a digital format can find a very large amount of information on the subject on line.

What is for sure is that digital photography is here to stay, and is becoming more and more refined and sophisticated. Thus making the whole subject of the capturing and processing of digital images increasingly fascinating to a fast growing group of people.


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