Benefits of Digital Photography

Both digital photography and traditional film based photography are based on certain fundamental ideas like capturing the image through a lens, use of a shutter to achieve it etc. The main difference between the two lies in how the image coming through the lens is converted and stored.

In conventional photography, the incoming light rays react with the chemical coating on the film and forms an image which is then developed in a dark room into a negative. This negative is turned into a positive by passing light through them on to a light sensitive paper which results in the photograph.

The process of capturing the image is totally different in digital photography. The light coming through the lens falls on electronic sensors made of Charge Coupled Devices (CCD) which convert the light into electrical impulses. The screen on which the image is captured comprises millions of pixels or picture elements which each pixel being a CCD. These impulses are processed instantaneously, converted to digital image and displayed on the screen as well as stored in memory or other storage devices.

The quality of digital images is measured in terms of the no. of pixels or the resolution of the screen. A typical computer monitor has a screen resolution of 800x600 which means that the monitor can display 800 pixels from left to right and 600 from top to bottom. The total no. of pixels adds up to 480 000 in this case. The resolution of the background screen in digital photography is much higher of the order of Mega pixels. The image size can be anywhere between 1.8 and 13.1 mega pixels depending on the quality of camera.

The range of colors is dependent on the bit size per pixel. For example 8 bits per pixel can store up to 255 shades of black and white pictures. 16 bits per pixel can have up to 65,536 shades of color while 24 bits per pixel can have 16 million color combinations. Most modern digital cameras for general use operate with 24 bits per pixel size while some of the professional ones can have 48 bits per pixel meaning 280 billion color combinations.

The quality of pictures printed is dependent on the number of pixels per inch of the photograph. The higher the number, the better the quality of photograph. Most photos printed in photography labs have 300 pixels per inch of print resolution. Thus the biggest picture that can be printed with a 2 mega pixels camera is 5.8 inches by 3.8 inches size while a 4 mega pixels camera can print 8.2 inches by 5.4 inches size photos. These are the photo sizes with 300 pixels per inch print resolution.

However with lesser 200 pixels per inch print resolution larger pictures with less detail can be printed. The quality would be sufficient for most general use. The size correspondingly increases to 8.7 inches by 5.8 inches for a 2 mega pixels camera and 12.2 inches by 8.2 inches for a 4 mega pixels camera.