How it works

     Let's say you want to take a picture and e-mail it to a friend. To do this, you need the image to be represented in the language that computers recognize -- bits and bytes, or ‘ones and zeroes’. A digital image is just a long string of 1s and 0s that represent all the tiny colored dots -- or pixels -- that collectively make up the image. If you want to get a picture into this form, you have two options:

• Take a photograph using a conventional film camera, process the film chemically, print it onto photographic paper and then use a digital scanner to sample the print (record the pattern of light as a series of pixel values).

• Directly sample the original light that bounces off your subject, immediately breaking that light pattern down into a series of pixel values -- in other words, you can use a digital camera.

     At its most basic level, this is what a digital camera does. Just like a conventional camera, it has a series of lenses that focus light to create an image of a scene. But instead of focusing this light onto a piece of film, it focuses it onto a semiconductor device that records light electronically. A computer then breaks this electronic information down into digital data. All the fun and interesting features of digital cameras come as a direct result of this process of conversion from light into bytes.