Digital Video Camera Is Out To Replace Analog Formats
Photographs taken with a digital video camera is made up of hundreds of thousands of tiny dots of light arranged in a grid. Each of these dots is called a pixel. A mega pixel is the short form of million pixels. Higher the numbers of pixels, clearer will your images be, and the more realistic colors your camera will be able to render. Nevertheless, when choosing a camera, always look for the number of effective pixels a camera can capture; instead of the gross number of pixels. Effective pixels are the number the CCD or CMOS chip or sensor actually processes when recording an image.
In the digital video camera, the pixel information is captured on the CCD or CMOS sensor, which is located just behind the lens. The CCD or CMOS sensor is the equivalent of the film in an analog camera. These sensors are available in different sizes. The larger the sensor, the ability to capture more light along with the image is enhanced; this results in a much clearer and sharper picture. This also means that the pictures are brighter, vivid and rich in colors. Also, the pictures taken on multiple sensors (usually the number is 3) the resultant picture is far more vivid than the ones taken on a single sensor. As of now, the three sensors capture the primary colors of red, green and blue. In fact an advertisement brought out by Panasonic vouches that there are 256 shades of red, green and blue produced by their digital video camera.
Digital video camera contains 3 major components: lens, imager, and recorder. The lens collects and focuses the received light onto the imager. The imager (usually a CCD or CMOS sensor on a modern digital video camcorder) converts incident light into an electrical signal and the recorder encodes the video signal into a storable form. The first part is that of the lens. This lens can be adjusted in one or more of the following ways. Controlling the aperture (to control the amount of light), zoom (to control the field of view), and shutter speed (to capture continuous motion by adjusting the speed of the shutter). These adjustments can either be made manually or set to an automatic function. In the automatic or auto mode the electronic circuitry of the camera fine tunes the focus and maintains constant exposure on the subject.
The imager section, the second element, is the most important part of the camcorder, which houses a photosensitive gadget. The imager converts light into an electronic signal through an intricate procedure. In a modern digital video camera, an analog to digital (ADC) converter digitizes the imager (analog) waveform output into a discrete digital video signal. The actual picture is broken down into a number of pixels. The third component (of the digital video camera), the recorder, is responsible for recording the resultant video signal onto a medium such as magnetic videotape. This is how a digital video camera is able to take photographs.
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