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Digital camera

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Canon PowerShot A95 - front and back

Front and back of Canon PowerShot A95, a typical pocket-sized compact camera

A digital camera or digicam is a camera that captures photographs in digital memory. Most cameras produced today are digital,[1] and while there are still dedicated digital cameras, many more cameras are now being incorporated into mobile devices, portable touchscreen computers, which can, among many other purposes, use their cameras to initiate live video-telephony and directly edit and upload imagery to others.[2] However, high-end, high-definition dedicated cameras are still commonly used by professionals.

Digital and movie cameras share an optical system, typically using a lens with a variable diaphragm to focus light onto an image pickup device.[3] The diaphragm and shutter admit the correct amount of light to the image, just as with film but the image pickup device is electronic rather than chemical. However, unlike film cameras, digital cameras can display images on a screen immediately after being recorded, and store and delete images from memory. Many digital cameras can also record moving videos with sound. Some digital cameras can crop and stitch pictures and perform other elementary image editing.

History[]

Further information: History of the camera, Digital imaging, Image sensor, Digital single-lens reflex camera, and Camera phone
Atalla1963

Mohamed M. Atalla invented the MOS transistor (1959) and MOS integrated circuit (1960), the basis for digital image sensors.

The basis for digital camera image sensors is metal–oxide–semiconductor (MOS) technology,[4][5] which originates from the invention of the MOSFET (MOS field-effect transistor) by Mohamed M. Atalla and Dawon Kahng at Bell Labs in 1959.[6] This led to the development of digital semiconductor image sensors, including the charge-coupled device (CCD) and later the CMOS sensor.[5] The first semiconductor image sensor was the charge-coupled device, developed by Willard S. Boyle and George E. Smith at Bell Labs in 1969,[7] based on MOS capacitor technology.[5] The NMOS active-pixel sensor was later invented by Tsutomu Nakamura's team at Olympus in 1985,[8][9][10] which led to the development of the CMOS active-pixel sensor (CMOS sensor) by Eric Fossum's team at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 1993.[11][9]

The Cromemco Cyclops was an all-digital camera introduced as a commercial product in 1975. Its design was published as a hobbyist construction project in the February 1975 issue of Popular Electronics magazine. It used a 32×32 MOS image sensor, which was a modified MOS dynamic RAM (DRAM) memory chip.[12]

Steven Sasson, an engineer at Eastman Kodak, invented and built a self-contained electronic camera that used a charge-coupled device (CCD) image sensor in 1975.[13][14][15] Around the same time, Fujifilm began developing CCD technology in the 1970s.[16]

Nasir Ahmed

Nasir Ahmed invented the discrete cosine transform (DCT) in 1972. DCT is the basis for most image compression formats.

Practical digital cameras were enabled by advances in data compression, due to the impractically high memory and bandwidth requirements of uncompressed images and video.[17] The most important compression algorithm is the discrete cosine transform (DCT),[17][18] a lossy compression technique that was first proposed by Nasir Ahmed while he was working at the University of Texas in 1972.[19] Practical digital cameras were enabled by DCT-based compression standards, including the H.26x and MPEG video coding standards introduced from 1988 onwards,[18] and the JPEG image compression standard introduced in 1992.[20][21]

Nikon was interested in digital photography since the mid-1980s. In 1986, while presenting to Photokina, Nikon introduced an operational prototype of the first SLR-type digital camera (Still Video Camera), manufactured by Panasonic.[22] The Nikon SVC was built around a sensor 2/3 " charge-coupled device of 300,000 pixels. Storage media, a magnetic floppy inside the camera allows recording 25 or 50 B&W images, depending of the definition.[23] In 1988, Nikon released the first commercial digital single-lens reflex camera (DSLR camera), the QV-1000C.[22]

Minolta RD-175 Digital SLR

The first portable digital SLR camera, introduced by Minolta in 1995.

At Photokina 1988, Fujifilm introduced the FUJIX DS-1P, the first fully digital camera, capable of saving data to a semiconductor memory card. The camera's memory card had a capacity of 2 MB of SRAM (static random-access memory), and could hold up to ten photographs. In 1989, Fujifilm released the FUJIX DS-X, the first fully digital camera to be commercially released.[16] In 1996, Toshiba's 40 MB flash memory card was adopted for several digital cameras.[24]

Capas-d1

Nikon D1, 1999

In 1995, Minolta introduced the RD-175, which was based on the Minolta 500si SLR with a splitter and three independent CCDs. This combination delivered 1.75M pixels. The benefit of using an SLR base was the ability to use any existing Minolta AF mount lens. 1999 saw the introduction of the Nikon D1, a 2.74 megapixel camera that was the first digital SLR developed entirely from the ground up by a major manufacturer, and at a cost of under $6,000 ($12,000 with inflation[25]) at introduction was affordable by professional photographers and high-end consumers. This camera also used Nikon F-mount lenses, which meant film photographers could use many of the same lenses they already owned.

The first full-frame digital SLR cameras were developed in Japan from around 2000 to 2002: the MZ-D by Pentax,[26] the N Digital by Contax's Japanese R6D team,[27] and the EOS-1Ds by Canon.[28] Gradually in the 2000s, the full-frame DSLR became the dominant camera type for professional photography.

The first commercial camera phone was the Kyocera Visual Phone VP-210, released in Japan in May 1999.[29] It was called a "mobile videophone" at the time,[30] and had a 110,000-pixel front-facing camera.[29] It stored up to 20 JPEG digital images, which could be sent over e-mail, or the phone could send up to two images per second over Japan's Personal Handy-phone System (PHS) cellular network.[29] The Samsung SCH-V200, released in South Korea in June 2000, was also one of the first phones with a built-in camera. It had a TFT liquid-crystal display (LCD) and stored up to 20 digital photos at 350,000-pixel resolution. However, it could not send the resulting image over the telephone function, but required a computer connection to access photos.[31] The first mass-market camera phone was the J-SH04, a Sharp J-Phone model sold in Japan in November 2000.[32][31] It could instantly transmit pictures via cell phone telecommunication.[33] By the mid-2000s, higher-end cell phones had an integrated digital camera. By the beginning of the 2010s, almost all smartphones had an integrated digital camera.

See also[]

  • Smart camera
  • Digital video camera
  • Digital signal processor
  • Vision processing unit

References[]

  1. ↑ Musgrove, Mike (2006-01-12). "Nikon Says It's Leaving Film-Camera Business". Washington Post. Retrieved 2007-02-23.
  2. ↑ Cooke, Alex (2017-10-30). "Nikon Closes China Camera Factory, Cites Smartphones as Cause". Fstoppers. Retrieved 2019-08-23.
  3. ↑ MakeUseOf: How does a Digital Camera Work; retrieved 2013-09-07
  4. ↑ Cressler, John D. (2017). "Let There Be Light: The Bright World of Photonics". Silicon Earth: Introduction to Microelectronics and Nanotechnology, Second Edition. CRC Press. p. 29. ISBN 978-1-351-83020-1.
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 Williams, J. B. (2017). The Electronics Revolution: Inventing the Future. Springer. pp. 245–8. ISBN 978-3-319-49088-5.
  6. ↑ "1960: Metal Oxide Semiconductor (MOS) Transistor Demonstrated". The Silicon Engine. Computer History Museum. Retrieved August 31, 2019.
  7. ↑ James R. Janesick (2001). Scientific charge-coupled devices. SPIE Press. pp. 3–4. ISBN 978-0-8194-3698-6.
  8. ↑ Matsumoto, Kazuya; et al. (1985). "A new MOS phototransistor operating in a non-destructive readout mode". Japanese Journal of Applied Physics. 24 (5A): L323. Bibcode:1985JaJAP..24L.323M. doi:10.1143/JJAP.24.L323.
  9. ↑ 9.0 9.1 Fossum, Eric R. (12 July 1993). Blouke, Morley M. (ed.). "Active pixel sensors: are CCDs dinosaurs?". SPIE Proceedings Vol. 1900: Charge-Coupled Devices and Solid State Optical Sensors III. International Society for Optics and Photonics: 2–14. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.408.6558. doi:10.1117/12.148585.
  10. ↑ Fossum, Eric R. (2007). "Active Pixel Sensors" (PDF). Semantic Scholar. Retrieved 8 October 2019.
  11. ↑ Fossum, Eric R.; Hondongwa, D. B. (2014). "A Review of the Pinned Photodiode for CCD and CMOS Image Sensors". IEEE Journal of the Electron Devices Society. 2 (3): 33–43. doi:10.1109/JEDS.2014.2306412.
  12. ↑ Benchoff, Brian (17 April 2016). "Building the First Digital Camera". Hackaday. Retrieved 30 April 2016. the Cyclops was the first digital camera
  13. ↑ Prakel, David (10 December 2009). The Visual Dictionary of Photography. AVA Publishing. p. 91. ISBN 978-2-940411-04-7. Retrieved 24 July 2013.
  14. ↑ Dobbin, Ben. (September 8, 2005) "Kodak engineer had revolutionary idea: the first digital camera." Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Retrieved on 2018-02-06.
  15. ↑ Estrin, James (August 12, 2015). "Kodak's First Digital Moment". The New York Times. Retrieved February 6, 2018.
  16. ↑ 16.0 16.1 "Innovation: FUJIX DS-1P: the world's first digital camera". Fujifilm.
  17. ↑ 17.0 17.1 Belmudez, Benjamin (2014). Audiovisual Quality Assessment and Prediction for Videotelephony. Springer. pp. 11–13. ISBN 978-3-319-14166-4.
  18. ↑ 18.0 18.1 Huang, Hsiang-Cheh; Fang, Wai-Chi (2007). Intelligent Multimedia Data Hiding: New Directions. Springer. p. 41. ISBN 978-3-540-71169-8.
  19. ↑ Ahmed, Nasir (January 1991). "How I Came Up With the Discrete Cosine Transform". Digital Signal Processing. 1 (1): 4–5. doi:10.1016/1051-2004(91)90086-Z.
  20. ↑ Hudson, Graham; Léger, Alain; Niss, Birger; Sebestyén, István; Vaaben, Jørgen (31 August 2018). "JPEG-1 standard 25 years: past, present, and future reasons for a success". Journal of Electronic Imaging. 27 (4): 1. doi:10.1117/1.JEI.27.4.040901.
  21. ↑ "What Is a JPEG? The Invisible Object You See Every Day". The Atlantic. 24 September 2013. Retrieved 13 September 2019.
  22. ↑ 22.0 22.1 David D. Busch (2011), Nikon D70 Digital Field Guide, page 11, John Wiley & Sons
  23. ↑ Nikon SLR-type digital cameras, Pierre Jarleton
  24. ↑ http://www.flash25.toshiba.com/
  25. ↑ 1634–1699: McCusker, J. J. (1997). How Much Is That in Real Money? A Historical Price Index for Use as a Deflator of Money Values in the Economy of the United States: Addenda et Corrigenda (PDF). American Antiquarian Society. 1700–1799: McCusker, J. J. (1992). How Much Is That in Real Money? A Historical Price Index for Use as a Deflator of Money Values in the Economy of the United States (PDF). American Antiquarian Society. 1800–present: Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. "Consumer Price Index (estimate) 1800–". Retrieved February 29, 2024.
  26. ↑ The long, difficult road to Pentax full-frame The long, difficult road to Pentax full-frame, Digital Photography Review
  27. ↑ British Journal of Photography, Issues 7410-7422, 2003, p. 2
  28. ↑ Canon EOS-1Ds, 11 megapixel full-frame CMOS, Digital Photography Review
  29. ↑ 29.0 29.1 29.2 "Camera phones: A look back and forward". Computerworld. 11 May 2012. Retrieved 15 September 2019.
  30. ↑ "First mobile videophone introduced". CNN. May 18, 1999. Retrieved 15 September 2019.
  31. ↑ 31.0 31.1 "From J-Phone to Lumia 1020: A complete history of the camera phone". Digital Trends. August 11, 2013. Retrieved 15 September 2019.
  32. ↑ "Evolution of the Camera phone: From Sharp J-SH04 to Nokia 808 Pureview". Hoista.net. 2012-02-28. Archived from the original on 2013-07-31. Retrieved 2013-06-21.
  33. ↑ "Taking pictures with your phone". BBC News. BBC. 18 September 2001. Retrieved 15 September 2019.
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