How does a digital camera take picture?In other words, describe the storage medium the camera substitutes for conventional film.

-- jocelyn nicole feintuch (mystik6002@aol.com), May 17, 2000

Answers

you're welcome!

-- immunoprecipitator (immunoprecipitator@yahoo.com), May 17, 2000.

Say you have a 2 megapixel camera. Maybe you have 25% red, 25% blue, 50% green pixels on the CCD. Each of these pixels can only detect that color, meaning the two megapixel claim is a big bunch of hooey. Then the camera does some interpolation to make this data into a roughly 2 megapixel RGB image, fudging in the process, since you don't really have this much data to begin with. It probably then compresses the image further in lossy JPEG format. This smooshed and fudged data goes onto removable flash media, which doesn't need power to maintain state. If you want to get technical, the reality is that little happy green men flip bits on the flash media that can either be on or off. The difference with film & digital is that on a camera the film itself reacts to the focused light, while on a digicam it's the CCD that does this, the flash medium just stores the photoelectric result from the CCD.

-- benoit (foo@bar.com), May 17, 2000.