A (brief) word about digital cameras

One of my recent posts talked about scanners and scanning technology. While a good scanner does an amazing job with flat art, obviously you cannot take your scanner downtown to scan the side of a building!

Once upon a time, you had to use a film camera to take a picture, and even up until a couple of years ago, you still needed film for high-quality pictures. At graffitipix.com, we make hi-end prints, and in order to do that you *must* start with a high-quality original.

Today's "good" digital cameras are now capable of creating high-quality original images. What constitutes a "good" image, or for that matter a "good" digital camera?

Just as with scanners, quality revolves around three criteria: spatial resolution, color depth, and optics.

Digital cameras, like flat-bed scanners, use CCD (Charge-Coupled Device) chips to "see". These are light-sensitive chips that convert an image into digital information.

CCD's are tiny matrixes of silicon that react to light. The size of the matrix i.e. number of rows and columns determine the spatial resolution of the image. A 2000 x 2000 matrix results in a 4,000,000 pixel (4 megapixel) image. Some cameras use software to create higher resolution, but basically thats how it works.

Color depth refers to how many shades, or gradations each pixel can be (most CCD's are 24-32 bit, meaning they can create millions of shades for each pixel).

The optics, of course, refer to the lense and the mechanics used to focus the light on the CCD.

Though decent CCD's are increasingly put into cel phones, you still need one of the 'better' digital cameras to create a good-quality original.

More on this shortly...

Molly