Buy Digital Camera
The digital camera buyer's guide
As digital photography keeps getting
better with higher resolutions, even more sophisticated controls
and better technology, getting great pictures is now a lot
easier than before.
However, buying a digital camera
is not all that easy for amateurs. There are a number of factors
that one must take into account before you decide to buy a
specific digital camera model. This guide offers you
a number of tips on buying the right digicam or digital camera
for you.
With a digital camera there are certain
features such as resolutions, picture storage and viewfinder
that would be essential. But depending on your needs and tastes
one might want further features like a zoom, self-timer and
of course a flash.
For amateur digital photographers, it is
vital that they envision the kind of pictures they would want
to shoot -- so that they can select their options wisely,
without making a dent on their bank balance.
How
Does a Digital Camera Work?
Like any other regular camera, a digital
camera also has a lens and a shutter that allows light
in. But in case of digicams, the light rays strike photosensitive
cells instead of the usual film.
For those who want to know the technical
aspects of things: The sensor array is a small chip about
6-10 mm in size. Each image sensor is a charged couple device
(CCD) that converts light into electrical charge. This charge
is stored as analog information and then further digitized
by another technology called an analog to digital converter
or ADC. Every receptor in the array of thousands creates 1
pixel, and for each pixel an amount of data is stored.
There are a few digicams that use CMOS
(complementary metal oxide semiconductor) chips as image sensors.
The process is essentially the same that is used to produce
DRAM & microprocessors in mass. So CMOS sensors are relatively
inexpensive and easier to compared to CCDs. The other benefits
of CMOS sensors are that they consume relatively less power
and also have other circuits included on the same chip. These
additional on-chip features can include analogue to digital
conversion, image compression, cameral controls as well as
antijitter stabilization.
However, these other circuits do consume
space that would normally be taken up for light sensing. This
in turn makes the sensor array relatively less sensitive to
light, which hampers image quality while usin the camera indoors
or in conditions where there is low light. To summarize, CMOS
cameras are compact, lighter, inexpensive and consume
les energy, but on the other hand they sacrifice image quality.
