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A digital camera takes the light emitted from the photo subject, and focuses it into the image sensor within the camera. Instead of photographic film, a digital camera has a light-sensing grid called a CCD or CMOS, which can record light as binary data that represents the brightness and the color frequencies. It records the data for millions of individual points, called pixels, which can be put together to recreate the original image. This is the same technology used in almost all computer images.

Using Digital Cameras

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.

At its most basic level, this is all there is to a digital camera. Just like a conventional camera, it has a series of lenses that focus light to create an image of a scene. But instead of focusing this light onto a piece of film, it focuses it onto a semiconductor device that records light electronically. A computer then breaks this electronic information down into digital data. A digital camera has a sensor that converts light into electrical charges.

The image sensor employed by most digital cameras is a charge coupled device (CCD). Some cameras use complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) technology instead. Both CCD and CMOS image sensors convert light into electrons. A simplified way to think about these sensors is to think of a 2-D array of thousands or millions of tiny solar cells.

Once the sensor converts the light into electrons, it reads the value (accumulated charge) of each cell in the image. This is where the differences between the two main sensor types kick in:

  • A CCD transports the charge across the chip and reads it at one corner of the array. An analog-to-digital converter (ADC) then turns each pixel's value into a digital value by measuring the amount of charge at each photo site and converting that measurement to binary form.
  • CMOS devices use several transistors at each pixel to amplify and move the charge using more traditional wires. The CMOS signal is digital, so it needs no ADC. .

The amount of detail that the camera can capture is called the resolution, and it is measured in millions of pixels (megapixels). The more pixels a camera has the more detail it can capture and the larger pictures can be without becoming blurry or "grainy."

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