Some digital camera terms explained

When I first bought a digital camera, there were only point and shoot types and the mega pixels were much fewer. Mine had only 3.1 and my son now has a mobile phone with 6 mega pixels. So, my camera (with fewer megapixels than the one below) is virtually useless and next I would definitely buy an SLR digital camera.

I used to upload some of my photos to the stock sites, like dreamstime, but the size of a photo taken with my camera is now quite small compared with the cameras with more mega pixels.  Dreamstime would specify that we should get rid of noise before uploading. I had no idea what noise was.

NOISE in a digital image has nothing to do with audio.  A digital camera emits photo receptors which are interpreted as black or randomly coloured dots. SLR digital cameras with a medium amount of mega pixels   have less noise than the smaller compact digital camera. But there is still noise. The makers therefore build in “noise reduction”. However noise reduction blurs fine detail. So the best digital camera is the SLR digital camera with a medium amount of mega pixels.

I’ve talked of mega pixels. A pixel is a tiny dot, thousands of which, make up an image. Now one would think that the more mega pixels the camera has , the better, but not so. My brother did research on this before he upgraded. The more mega pixels you have, the more NOISE.

ISO has always been a standard for cameras. In the old cameras before the digital, ISO settings were narrow, from about 50 to 400, 800.  With the new digital camera the ISO can be set to between 50 to 6500. But using a higher ISO can also mean more noise. The ISO determines the speed of the shot you can take: for moving objects you would have a higher ISO and still shots would have a much lower ISO.

More terms expained soon…

Posted on January 19th, 2009 under education, gadgets, photography, tutorials, web graphics • Tags: digital cameras, ISO, mega pixels, SLR. • RSS 2.0 feed • Leave a response, or trackback