Name: Sydney Course: Digital Studios
Date: 9/25/07
CCD →
➢-Charged-Coupled Device
➢-A sense light and facilitates the recording of an image in digital cameras and scanners.
➢-A computer chip that contains a grid of a coupled
➢-Has the capability to store energy and pass it to other capacitor
Capacitor →
➢ Represents one pixel
➢ The smallest image element a camera or a scanner can record
➢ Example: A 3.1-megapixel camera will have 3.1 million capacitors on its CCD.
How does a digital camera work? →
➢ The light passes through the lens and lands on the CCD. CCD shoots light at each capacitor, and then records the information onto memory.
How does the CCD work? →
➢ Light (photons) travel through the lens and hits the CCD.
➢ Photons that strike the atoms will free electrons.
➢ More light frees more electrons, less lights frees less
➢ A circuit at the bottom can measure the voltage of each element in the last row
➢ The remaining rows pass information (electrons) to another row that is below which is in turn red, this process is repeated until read.
Video Cameras →
➢ A video camera moves much faster (up to 40 times faster).
➢ A standard video camera has a resolution of around 640 x 480 reads about 307,200 capacitors 40 times a second (12,288,000 capacitors per second.)
➢ This procedure can only record a certain amount of light. For colored images the most common method is Bayer Mask.
Over each set of four capacitors 1 is filtered blue, one red and 2
Green. (uses more green because the human eye sees more green.)
Luminance →
➢ Amount of light
➢ A luminance is recorded on each pixel but color information is much less.
➢ One luminance is worth 500,000 (pixels 250 red, 250 blue)
➢ The final picture is a average of the grouping of pixels
Interpolation→3 CCD’s→
➢ Some cameras only use this→ light passes through the lens into a “beam splitter”→red, green, and blue.
➢ The image is high quality and usually expensive.
Summary: This article was mostly about digital cameras and how they work. One section in the article is about video cameras and how they work also. You also learn about CCD’s and how the small screen on a digital camera works.