Digital camera

A digital camera or digicam is a camera that captures photographs in digital memory. Most cameras produced today are digital, and while there are still dedicated digital cameras, many more cameras are now being incorporated into mobile devices, portable touchscreen computers, which can, among many other purposes, use their cameras to initiate live video-telephony and directly edit and upload imagery to others. However, high-end, high-definition dedicated cameras are still commonly used by professionals.Mini CDMicrodrive (CF-II)USB flash drive3.5' floppy disksSony's Memory Stick A digital camera or digicam is a camera that captures photographs in digital memory. Most cameras produced today are digital, and while there are still dedicated digital cameras, many more cameras are now being incorporated into mobile devices, portable touchscreen computers, which can, among many other purposes, use their cameras to initiate live video-telephony and directly edit and upload imagery to others. However, high-end, high-definition dedicated cameras are still commonly used by professionals. Digital and movie cameras share an optical system, typically using a lens with a variable diaphragm to focus light onto an image pickup device. The diaphragm and shutter admit the correct 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 elementary image editing. The history of the digital camera began with Eugene F. Lally of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who was thinking about how to use a mosaic photosensor to capture digital images. His 1960s 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 film-less camera (US patent 4,057,830) in 1972, the technology had yet to catch up with the concept. 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, and it used a 32×32 Metal Oxide Semiconductor sensor. Steven Sasson, an engineer at Eastman Kodak, invented and built a self-contained electronic camera that used a charge-coupled device (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. Nikon was interested in digital photography since the mid-1980s. In 1986, while presenting to Photokina, Nikon introduced an operational prototype of the first SLR-type digital camera (Still Video Camera), manufactured by Panasonic. The Nikon SVC was built around a sensor 2/3 ' charge-coupled device of 300000 pixels. Storage media, a magnetic floppy inside the camera allows recording 25 or 50 B&W images, depending of the definition. In 1988, Nikon released the first commercial DSLR camera, the QV-1000C. At Photokina 1988, Fujifilm introduced the FUJIX DS-1P, the first fully digital camera, capable of saving data to a semiconductor memory card. The camera's memory card had a capacity of 2 MB of SRAM memory, 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. In 2000, Sharp introduced the world's first digital camera phone, the J-SH04 J-Phone, in Japan. By the mid-2000s, higher-end cell phones had an integrated digital camera. By the beginning of the 2010s, almost all smartphones had an integrated digital camera. The two major types of digital image sensor 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 (BSI-CMOS) sensor. Overall final image quality is more dependent on the image processing capability of the camera, than on sensor type.