I’ve never been able to grasp how it is possible to take photos or videos. I know in school we were taught about it but it never clicked.
In: Technology
Digital cameras work by using a lens to focus light down onto a sensor. when you focus the light you form an image of what the lens is seeing, so you can imagine it as a picture of what the lens sees being projected onto the sensor.
A digital sensor these days will be a CMOS sensor which works by converting photons that hit it into a charge, then at the end of the exposure it counts how much charge is in each pixel. More charge means more light. This gets converted into a digital image which is essentially a map of how bright the image on the sensor was at each pixel.
The way we get colour is by using a pattern of red, green and blue filters in front of the pixels, so 1/4 of the pixels only detect red light, 1/4 only detect blue and 1/2 only detect green. Now when we get the map of how bright the image is we can do some guesswork to estimate the colour of each pixel based on its colour/brightness and the colour/brightness of the surrounding pixels.
Video is the exact same but you take many pictures and string them together, normally you have to make some compromises to how much information you store by having these images at a lower resolution and using less numbers to represent brightness.
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