To understand the term of digital sensors we have to imagine an array of buckets collecting rain water. Digital sensors work the same way buy they consist of an array of pixels collecting photons, the minute energy packets of which light consists. The light sensitive photodiode converts the number of photons collected in each pixel [...]
Archive for October, 2010
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Micro lenses
October 25th, 2010 
Andrei Microlensses are usually placed on top of the color filter array on certain sensors of digital cameras, their principal role being to overcome the limitation of a low fill factor. Microlenses are also used in order to funnel the photons of a larger area into a smaller area of light sensitive photodiode. Microlenses are small [...]
Manual focus
October 21st, 2010 Andrei There are two ways of focusing: the automatic one (built in your camera) and the manual one (by hands). When you use manual focus the automatic focus is disabled. Usually, manual focus is used when you have to deal with low light or macro/special effects while taking a picture. With some digital cameras, manually focus [...]
LCD
October 18th, 2010 Andrei The LCD is used as a viewfinder by digital compact cameras. To be able to use it you need to capture a live video feed of the scene, which is provided by the LCD. The LCD’s normally measure between 1.5″ and 2.5″ diagonally, with typical resolutions between 120,000 and 240,000 pixels. But there are LCD’s [...]
Firmware
October 13th, 2010 Andrei Each digital camera has a set of microprocessors which control camera’s sensor, buffer, LCD, autofocus, etc. These microprocessors are also controlled by “firmware”, which is software stored in the Read Only Memory (ROM) of the camera. In order to enhance performance and/or add new features, most of the cameras allow the firmware to be upgraded. [...]
Fill Factor
October 9th, 2010 Andrei Fill factor, in the context of solar cell technology, is defined as the ratio (given as percent) of the actual maximum obtainable power, (Vmp x Jmp) to the theoretical (not actually obtainable) power. In the context of photography and cameras, the fill factor indicates the size of the light sensitive photodiode relative to the surface [...]
EXIF
October 5th, 2010 Andrei A digital camera doesn’t store only information about the pixels of the image, it also stores information about the date and time a picture was taken, aperture, shutterspeed, ISO and many other camera settings. All these information, also called “metadata” are stored in a header. One of the most used type of header is EXIF [...]
Effective Pixels
October 1st, 2010 Andrei As we look at a digital image, we must understand that the number of pixels is not the same thing with the number of sensor pixels measurements that were used to produce that image. In conventional sensors, each pixel has one photodiode which corresponds with one pixel in the image. A conventional sensor in, for [...]
