What is digital photography and how does it compare to traditional photography? A digital camera works a lot differently than a traditional 35mm camera. Digital photography uses a special kinda of camera which stores pictures digitally instead of on film like a traditional camera. These cameras contain special memory cards that you can insert into the camera and take out that store the photos. These cards come in different sizes. Types of cards are smart cards, compact cards, and other media cards. A memory card is measured by its memory size, in megabytes (MB). The more memory the card has the more images it can hold. Thus, a 256 MB memory card will be able to hold many more images than a 32 MB memory card.
A digital camera captures an image through a sensor called a CCD. This sensor has light sensing dots called pixels. The actual resolution of a camera is the total number of pixels that are located on the CCD sensor. Resolutions of digital cameras range from 0.3 megapixels to currently about 11 megapixels. A megapixel is just a way of expressing how many pixels are on the CCD sensor, in millions. The more pixels a digital camera has on its CCD sensor, the larger the pictures you can take and the better quality the picture is. It is better to print a picture at a higher megapixel than a smaller one.
Optical Zoom v. Digital Zoom
Most digital cameras come with a zoom lens, which allows you to adjust the length of the lens to either move closer to the object or to move farther away from the object. While zoom lenses are normal for 35mm cameras, digital cameras usually come with two types of zoom on them. The first is the optical zoom which is identical to that found on traditional cameras. When using optical zoom, you can get closer to a particular object without any sacrifice in image quality. Digital zoom, however, is a new type of zoom that is found only in digital cameras. When using digital zoom, the camera itself modifies the image electronically to bring the object you are photographing closer to you. It does this by cropping the image and then blowing up the middle of the image while making the quality of the image not as good. The result of this is that photographing objects using digital zoom usually produces grainy, blocky images.