Digital camera
A digital camera, also called a digicam, is a camera that captures photographs in digital memory. Most cameras produced since the turn of the 21st century are digital, largely replacing those that capture images on photographic film or film stock. Digital cameras are now widely incorporated into mobile devices like smartphones with the same or more capabilities and features of dedicated cameras. High-end, high-definition dedicated cameras are still commonly used by professionals and those who desire to take higher-quality photographs.
Digital cameras and film-based cameras have similar optical systems, typically using a lens with a variable diaphragm to focus light onto an image pickup device. The diaphragm and shutter admit a controlled amount of light to the image, just as with film, but the image pickup device is electronic rather than chemical. However, unlike film cameras, digital cameras can display images on a screen immediately after being recorded, and store and delete images from memory. Many digital cameras can also record moving videos with sound. Some digital cameras can crop and stitch pictures and perform other kinds of image editing.
History
The first semiconductor image sensor was the charge-coupled device, invented by Willard S. Boyle and George E. Smith at Bell Labs in 1969, based on MOS capacitor technology. The NMOS active-pixel sensor was later invented by Tsutomu Nakamura's team at Olympus in 1985, which led to the development of the CMOS active-pixel sensor at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 1993.In the 1960s, Eugene F. Lally of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory was thinking about how to use a mosaic photosensor to capture digital images. His idea was to take pictures of the planets and stars while travelling through space to give information about the astronauts' position. As with Texas Instruments employee Willis Adcock's filmless camera in 1972, the technology had yet to catch up with the concept.
In 1972, the started taking digital images of Earth. The MSS, designed by Virginia Norwood at Hughes Aircraft Company starting in 1969, captured and transmitted image data from green, red, and two infrared bands with 6 bits per channel, using a mechanical rocking mirror and an array of 24 detectors. Operating for six years, it transmitted more than 300,000 digital photographs of Earth while orbiting the planet about 14 times per day.
Also in 1972, Thomas McCord from MIT and James Westphal from Caltech together developed a . Their 1972 " used an analog-to-digital converter and a digital frame memory to store 256 x 256-pixel images of planets and stars, which were then recorded on digital magnetic tape. CCD sensors were not yet commercially available, and the camera used a silicon diode vidicon tube detector, which was cooled using dry ice to reduce dark current, allowing exposure times of up to one hour.
The Cromemco Cyclops was an all-digital camera introduced as a commercial product in 1975. Its design was published as a hobbyist construction project in the February 1975 issue of Popular Electronics magazine. It used a 32×32 metal–oxide–semiconductor image sensor, which was a modified MOS dynamic RAM memory chip.
Steven Sasson, an engineer at Eastman Kodak, built a self-contained electronic camera that used a monochrome Fairchild Semiconductor CCD image sensor in 1975. Around the same time, Fujifilm began developing CCD technology in the 1970s. Early uses were mainly military and scientific, followed by medical and news applications.
The first filmless SLR camera was publicly demonstrated by Sony in August 1981. The Sony Mavica used a color-striped 2/3" format CCD sensor with 280K pixels, along with analogue video signal processing and recording. The Mavica electronic still camera recorded FM-modulated analog video signals on a newly developed 2" magnetic floppy disk, dubbed the "Mavipak". The disk format was later standardized as the "Still Video Floppy", or "SVF".
The Canon RC-701, introduced in May 1986, was the first SVF camera sold in the US. It employed an SLR viewfinder, included a 2/3" format color CCD sensor with 380K pixels, and was sold along with a removable 11-66mm and 50-150mm zoom lens. Over the next few years, many other companies began selling SVF cameras. These analog electronic cameras included the Nikon QV-1000C, which had an SLR viewfinder and a 2/3" format monochrome CCD sensor with 380K pixels and recorded analog black-and-white images on a Still Video Floppy.
At Photokina 1988, Fujifilm introduced the FUJIX DS-1P, the first fully digital camera, which recorded digital images using a semiconductor memory card. The camera's memory card had a capacity of 2 MB of SRAM and could hold up to ten photographs. In 1989, Fujifilm released the FUJIX DS-X, the first fully digital camera to be commercially released. In 1996, Toshiba's 40 MB flash memory card was adopted for several digital cameras.
The first commercial camera phone was the Kyocera Visual Phone VP-210, released in Japan in May 1999. It was called a "mobile videophone" at the time, and had a 110,000-pixel front-facing camera. It stored up to 20 JPEG digital images, which could be sent over e-mail, or the phone could send up to two images per second over Japan's Personal Handy-phone System cellular network. The Samsung SCH-V200, released in South Korea in June 2000, was also one of the first phones with a built-in camera. It had a TFT liquid-crystal display and stored up to 20 digital photos at 350,000-pixel resolution. However, it could not send the resulting image over the telephone function but required a computer connection to access photos. The first mass-market camera phone was the J-SH04, a Sharp J-Phone model sold in Japan in November 2000. It could instantly transmit pictures via cell phone telecommunication.
By the mid-2000s, higher-end cell phones had an integrated digital camera, and by the early 2010s, almost all smartphones had an integrated digital camera. In the early 2020's a revival of digital cameras produced from the early 2000s occurred as a TikTok trend and other online marketplaces such as eBay and Etsy. The trend was noted with Gen Z as being nostalgic and homage to Y2K aesthetic.
Image sensors
The two major types of digital image sensors are CCD and CMOS. A CCD sensor has one amplifier for all the pixels, while each pixel in a CMOS active-pixel sensor has its own amplifier. Compared to CCDs, CMOS sensors use less power. Cameras with a small sensor use a back-side-illuminated CMOS sensor. The image processing capabilities of the camera determine the outcome of the final image quality much more than the sensor type.Sensor resolution
The resolution of a digital camera is often limited by the image sensor that turns light into discrete signals. The brighter the image at a given point on the sensor, the larger the value that is read for that pixel.Depending on the physical structure of the sensor, a color filter array may be used, which requires demosaicing to recreate a full-color image. The number of pixels in the sensor determines the camera's "pixel count".
In a typical sensor, the pixel count is the product of the number of rows and the number of columns. For example, a 1,000 by 1,000-pixel sensor would have 1,000,000 pixels, or 1 megapixel.
Resolution options
Firmwares' resolution selector allows the user to optionally lower the resolution to reduce the file size per picture and extend lossless digital zooming. The bottom resolution option is typically 640×480 pixels.A lower resolution extends the number of remaining photos in free space, postponing the exhaustion of space storage, which is of use where no further data storage device is available and for captures of lower significance, where the benefit from less space storage consumption outweighs the disadvantage from reduced detail.
Image sharpness
An image's sharpness is presented through the crisp detail, defined lines, and its depicted contrast. Sharpness is a factor of multiple systems throughout the DSLR camera by its ISO, resolution, lens, and the lens settings, the environment of the image, and its post-processing. Images have a possibility of being too sharp, but they can never be too in focus.A digital camera resolution is determined by a digital sensor. The digital sensor indicates a high level of sharpness can be produced through the amount of noise and grain that is tolerated through the lens of the camera. Resolution within the field of digital stills and digital movies is indicated through the camera's ability to determine detail based on the distance, which is then measured by frame size, pixel type, number, and organization. Although some DSLR cameras have limited resolutions, it is almost impossible to not have the proper sharpness for an image. The ISO choice when taking a photo affects the quality of the image, as high ISO settings equate to an image that is less sharp due to the increased amount of noise allowed into the image, along with too little noise, which can also produce an image that is not sharp.
Methods of image capture
Since the first digital backs were introduced, there have been three main methods of capturing the image, each based on the hardware configuration of the sensor and color filters.Single-shot capture systems use either one sensor chip with a Bayer filter mosaic, or three separate image sensors which are exposed to the same image via a beam splitter.
Multi-shot exposes the sensor to the image in a sequence of three or more openings of the lens aperture. There are several methods of application of the multi-shot technique. The most common was originally to use a single image sensor with three filters passed in front of the sensor in sequence to obtain the additive color information. Another multiple-shot method is called microscanning. This method uses a single sensor chip with a Bayer filter and physically moves the sensor on the focus plane of the lens to construct a higher resolution image than the native resolution of the chip. A third version combines these two methods without a Bayer filter on the chip.
The third method is called scanning because the sensor moves across the focal plane much like the sensor of an image scanner. The linear or tri-linear sensors in scanning cameras utilize only a single line of photosensors, or three lines for the three colors. Scanning may be accomplished by moving the sensor or by rotating the whole camera. A digital rotating line camera offers images consisting of a total resolution that is very high.
Improvements in single-shot cameras and image file processing at the beginning of the 21st century made single-shot cameras almost completely dominant, even in high-end commercial photography.