How does a digital camera turn light from a lens into a series of 0s and 1s?
In: Technology
There’s a pretty good diagram and explanation here. Basically you put red, green, and blue color filters in front of photosensitive material (the sort of elements that allow electricity to flow when light shines on them, like in a nightlight) and when they’re arranged in a grid pattern you can start to assemble a 2D image from them.
Fun fact you can also do this with a single photodiode by scanning left, right, up and down. Fax machines and scanning electron microscopes essentially work like this, and old CRT TVs work in oppositely (a single electron beam that scans left to right, row by row, not to sense light but to project it onto a phosphorescent screen.) It just takes more time so if you can pack a bunch of photosensors into a tiny grid it’s better. Even still, a grid of digital sensors usually gets turned into a single steam of data, row by row, for simplicity and cost savings.
https://www.hatiandskoll.com/2013/04/11/building-a-digital-camera-sensor-from-a-charge-coupled-device/
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