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Digital camera

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Digital camera

A digital camera, also called a digicam, is a camera that captures photographs in digital memory. Most cameras produced since the turn of the 21st century are digital, largely replacing those that capture images on photographic film or film stock. Digital cameras are now widely incorporated into mobile devices like smartphones with the same or more capabilities and features of dedicated cameras. High-end, high-definition dedicated cameras are still commonly used by professionals and those who desire to take higher-quality photographs.

Digital and digital movie cameras share an optical system, typically using a lens with a variable diaphragm to focus light onto an image pickup device. The diaphragm and shutter admit a controlled amount of light to the image, just as with film, but the image pickup device is electronic rather than chemical. However, unlike film cameras, digital cameras can display images on a screen immediately after being recorded, and store and delete images from memory. Many digital cameras can also record moving videos with sound. Some digital cameras can crop and stitch pictures and perform other kinds of image editing.

The first semiconductor image sensor was the charge-coupled device (CCD), invented by Willard S. Boyle and George E. Smith at Bell Labs in 1969, based on MOS capacitor technology. The NMOS active-pixel sensor was later invented by Tsutomu Nakamura's team at Olympus in 1985, which led to the development of the CMOS active-pixel sensor (CMOS sensor) at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 1993.

In the 1960s, Eugene F. Lally of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory was thinking about how to use a mosaic photosensor to capture digital images. His idea was to take pictures of the planets and stars while travelling through space to give information about the astronauts' position. As with Texas Instruments employee Willis Adcock's filmless camera (US patent 4,057,830) in 1972, the technology had yet to catch up with the concept.

In 1972, the Landsat 1 satellite's multispectral scanner (MSS) started taking digital images of Earth. The MSS, designed by Virginia Norwood at Hughes Aircraft Company starting in 1969, captured and transmitted image data from green, red, and two infrared bands with 6 bits per channel, using a mechanical rocking mirror and an array of 24 detectors. Operating for six years, it transmitted more than 300,000 digital photographs of Earth while orbiting the planet about 14 times per day.

Also in 1972, Thomas McCord from MIT and James Westphal from Caltech together developed a digital camera for use with telescopes. Their 1972 "photometer-digitizer system" used an analog-to-digital converter and a digital frame memory to store 256 x 256-pixel images of planets and stars, which were then recorded on digital magnetic tape. CCD sensors were not yet commercially available, and the camera used a silicon diode vidicon tube detector, which was cooled using dry ice to reduce dark current, allowing exposure times of up to one hour.   

The Cromemco Cyclops was an all-digital camera introduced as a commercial product in 1975. Its design was published as a hobbyist construction project in the February 1975 issue of Popular Electronics magazine. It used a 32×32 metal–oxide–semiconductor (MOS) image sensor, which was a modified MOS dynamic RAM (DRAM) memory chip.

Steven Sasson, an engineer at Eastman Kodak, built a self-contained electronic camera that used a monochrome Fairchild CCD image sensor in 1975. Around the same time, Fujifilm began developing CCD technology in the 1970s. Early uses were mainly military and scientific, followed by medical and news applications.

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