Digital photography is everywhere. From the cover of the latest wildlife magazine to the page three news on the newspaper, digital cameras have taken over the world solely occupied by traditional film roll cameras – and with good reason. With the entire architecture of our world going digital, it was only natural that the eyes of this new smarter world was also something digital. With this in mind, it is not hard to understand why digitalisation of cameras had started off. The professional photographers of today use Digital Single Lens Reflex cameras (DSLR’s) instead of the analogue SLR’s of yesteryears. They use them for the same reason as all people use digital utilities – flexibility and ease of editing. For the same reason, digital cameras were invented, and their story starts in 1969 when the Charge-Coupled Device was invented.
In the Bell Labs of the United States of America, George Smith and Willard Boyle drafted the first diagrams and charts of the Charge-Coupled Device (CCD) do develop a semiconductor based video transponder to be used in video conferencing. Within a year they developed the most basic of CCD models of the digital camera and in five more years, showed it to the world. CCD’s form the heart and soul of the digital camera. If the lens is the eye of the camera, the CCD is the brain. It translates light and its colours into electric voltage that affect a processor inside it to translate this voltage back into colour in a digital format. Everything from copying machines to a web camera have a CCD powering their sensing.
In 1981, Sony corporation built the first true digital camera for consumer use called the Mavica {Magnetic Video Camera). Storing the images in a small floppy disc as magnetic impulses, the Mavica camera was a very bulky looking device that produced small and low resolution pictures. It was not a market bashing bestseller, but it was a start.
Five years later, Kodak developed the first 1 Mega-pixel sensor on a CCD – the 1.3 Mega-pixel sensor was used this CCD in many digital photography devices, but no cameras as such since it was an expensive affair and quite bulky. It was not until the Nikon F-3 camera came out that had 1.3 MP quality for photojournalists.
After that, the arena of digital photography expanded by leaps and bounds as we know it. The amount of work done on this field is large and massive, and every day new techniques are being used for better quality and affordability of digital photography.