Camera Electronics

One of the amazing inventions of the digital age has been the digital camera. Who would have thought twenty years ago that we would be able to take pictures without film, have those pictures developed inside the camera and then be able to e-mail these pictures to our family and friends all over the country. The process that allows digital photography is converting conventional analog information into digital information and this is the same technology that has brought us a wave of digital products. DVDs, High Defintion Television (HDTV) and MP3 players are all using this same conversion process. Our old cameras depend entirely on chemical and mechanical processes in order to take and develop photographs. Digital cameras have a built in computer that performs all of these functions electronically. So how do they really work? When you take a picture using a digital camera you create an image on the computer inside your digital camera, in the language that computers will universally recognize. The basic language of a computer is a just string of 1’s and 0’s and the digital image that your camera records is just a collection of those 1’s and 0’s strung together in what is called a pixel. The digital camera saves your picture in this pixel format and lets you review it using the computer inside the camera, download it as a file to your home computer, and then save it, store

it, or e-mail it to your friends and family. That is really all there is to a digital camera. Just like your old camera, it has a series of lenses that focus light to create an image of a scene. But instead of transferring this image onto a piece of film, it focuses it onto a semiconductor device that records it electronically. Digital photography is fun because you can always erase your mistakes and start over. You can also preview any shot before you take it and with new software you can manipulate and manage your raw photos into works of art. All it requires is reading the manual, pointing and clicking. The computer inside your digital camera will do all the rest.