I kind of have an understanding about film camera, but for some reason I cannot wrap my head around how digital cameras work. From a mechanical and engineering standpoint, what is the actual difference between how the two operate?
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Functionally there’s not much of a difference between film and digital in terms of optics. There isn’t much of a reason a 40-year old 35mm SLR couldn’t be retrofitted to be a digital camera if you wanted to badly enough. Things like Digital Backs were a thing a decade or so ago so you could make a Cannon AE1 or a Nikon F3 digital.
Technically a digital camera uses a CCD or CMOS chip with a pixal array which is light sensitive to capture an image where it captures the image one row at a time. There are two different types of shutters that can be used (in logic), a Rolling shutter, which captures the image one row at a time, and a global shutter, where the image is captured all pixels at once, but it’s still read one line at a time. Rolling Shutters produce excellent images on static and slow moving objects, but get distortion on high speed objects, Global shutters are used for capturing high-speed objects.
On-board computers process the data into a usable image format.
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