How Does a Digital Camera Work?
How a digital camera works is a mystery to most people. Indeed, most of the products and devices we use on a daily basis are taken for granted.
The digital revolution has changed the way we view and live with devices that bring us all different kinds of entertainment.
But when you boil it all down, those electronic products created within the last couple of decades (including DVD players, CDs, MP3s, and digital cameras) each employ the same basic principles.
It’s the conversion of analog information into digital information (bits made up of ones and zeros) that made the digital landscape as broad as it is today. This basic idea of how a new breed of electronics can operate has given us devices we once only dreamt about.
But no digital device is as remote from its ancestor as the digital camera.
So, just exactly how does a digital camera work?
Let’s take a look at the basic of how a digital camera works. After that we’ll take a peek at digital camera resolution, and what precisely the amount of megapixels has to do with anything at all.
Here’s how a digital camera works:
How Does a Digital Camera Work: The Basics
The first thing to understand is just how amazingly different a digital camera is from the conventional camera.
The conventional camera (still in relative common use, as opposed to the VCR and cassette players of yesterday) relied wholly on mechanical and chemical processes. It didn’t even need an electronic power supply to operate. You simply pointed and shot, and the image was chemically fixed to film.
How a digital camera works is vastly different.
First of all, digital cameras house actual computers in the casing capable of recording and transferring an image through electrical impulses.
When you snap a shot with a digital camera, the shutter opens very quickly. When this happens, every single pixel on the image sensor captures the brightness of the light that hits it.
When the shutter shuts again after the snap is taken, the brightness charge from each pixel is recorded and translated into a digital number.
The series of numbers (ones and zeros) collected by the single shot is then used to reconstruct the photo into a digital image and file on your camera. This is done by matching the brightness and colors captured by the image sensor when the shutter was open into the right order.
And that, very briefly, is how a digital camera works.
But what is all this talk about resolution?
Resolution: How a Digital Camera Works
The resolution is the quality of picture your digital camera can take. The higher the resolution, the more detail and subtlety the picture can reveal.
How a digital camera works well is dependent on how high the resolution is. And resolution is measured in pixels.
One megapixel is equal to one million pixels. A top of the line amateur digital camera may have 12 megapixel resolution (or 12 million pixels). Some of the high-end professional cameras can 24 or more megapixels (or 24 million or more pixels).
Here’s a brief list of regular resolutions you might find on various digital cameras:
- 256×256 (65,000 pixels) – This kind of resolution is of the lowest grade. You will only find resolution this small on the most inexpensive cameras on the market.
- 1216×912 (over one million pixels) – This kind of resolution is good for printing pictures, but not very spectacular ones. A camera with 1216×912 resolution is good for the amateur, not so much for the professional.
- 4064×2704 (11.1 megapixels) – This is a top of the line digital camera found in most retail stores. 11.1 megapixel resolution is great for printing high quality pictures.
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