Hardware Bible

A digital camera doesn't need film—that's the whole point of it—and it doesn't need a film company. No need for the photofinisher any more, either. The digital camera is a revolution in photography. Better than Polaroid, you don't have to wait to see...

There are three kinds of camera that capture digital images. In theory, you can use any of the three to make digital images, although some work better for specific purposes. Still Cameras When anyone talks about digital cameras, they mean digital ...

The heart of any digital camera is its image sensor, which actually captures the image, registering it in a form that can later be used. It detects photons and translates their energy into a minute electrical current that computer circuits can sense,...

The lens determines the quality of the images that are formed inside a camera. The lens and its quality determine what kind of image your camera can collect and to a great degree set the ultimate quality of picture you can hope to take. You can take...

Technically speaking, a zoom lens is one that allows you to change its focal length within a given range. For most people, however, the results of the zooming process are more important. ing lets you change the size of the image in your viewfinder an...

The role of the shutter in a camera is to limit the amount of light getting in. Certainly too much light will overexpose film and overwhelm image sensors, but constraining the quantity of light isn't the only function of the shutter. After all, reduc...

The lens aperture and shutter can control the light striking the light sensor, but to do the job properly, they need to be carefully controlled. A sunny day may be 10,000 times brighter than a dark room, yet the camera's light sensor is called upon t...

No matter how sensitive a light sensor is, none can find an image in absolute darkness. When it's truly dark, there are no photons available to register on it. To allow you to take photographs even when insufficient light is available, most digital c...

All lenses must be focused to present a sharp image. At the point of focus, the light rays emanating from any point on the subject are brought back together again as a single point in the resulting image—or as close as possible to a single point. Ray...

") Although color temperature is a complex concept, the effect of white balance is easy to judge—scenes taken under incandescent lighting look abnormally orange. Whereas adjusting for color temperature with chemical cameras meant toting around a set ...

Most digital cameras use flash memory to store the images they capture. Inexpensive cameras have only built-in memory, which allows them to hold a finite number of images—typically about a dozen—before you need to download them to a computer or prin...

The viewfinder is named after its function: It helps you find the view that you want to photograph. A plain viewfinder does nothing but give you a view. It can be as simple as two frames that you line up to locate the image that the camera will pictu...

In framing a shot, the only image you need to see displayed on the LCD view panel on the back of your camera is a full-screen look through the lens. For the review of photos you've previously captured, however, most digital cameras offer additional m...

The technical aspects of each are described in Chapter 11, "Ports." The standard serial connection accommodates the widest range of computers but is also the slowest connection in general use. A so-called "high-speed" serial interface in the compute...

Or you can record images from your digital still camera on a VCR or, with a video input, on your computer. Note that you cannot get video images at the full resolution of your camera. Analog video outputs of digital cameras typically follow the stan...

That power has to come from somewhere, and the places of choice are two—from self-contained batteries or from utility-supplied electricity through an external transformer, the ubiquitous power brick. Batteries Unlike camcorders, the batteries for ...