A stripped down view of the Digital Camera

Lets start simple with the digital camera camera, which was a 'wow' accessory half a decade back, but an affordable necessity these days.
Probably the biggest change in the digital camera which has gone well with the common user is the cheap replacement of the 'camera roll' of a film camera which captures some 30 odd pictures in a film roll, by a small piece of plastic memory card which never seems to fill up and can store photos over and over again(Well, technically speaking, the memory card is not the equivalent replacement of the film roll, but i'll get to that later). Add to this a display where you can see what you've clicked immediately...tat tah da!..you have got a winning combination!
The layman physics of what happens in a Digital camera is that an image seen through the lens of the camera is 'captured' by a sensor and transferred to a memory storage device(card). As simple as that :-).

Associating a sensor to a camera might be new to many. This unacknowledged device is the place where the Mega Pixel(MP) of a camera is decided!..That's important, isn't it?!. You could imagine the sensor as the canvas of a painter. Just as a painter splashes it with colors, the colors of the world are splashed on the sensor which(colors/images) is then digitized and safely tucked away in the memory card. It is the sensor that is the replacement for the film roll.

The technology behind camera sensors is nothing short of ground breaking. If you dig deep, you'll find that camera sensors are either CCD(Charge Coupled Device) sensors or CMOS sensors with the later being the relatively newer technology. I'll sign off this section with the info that the inventors of CCD shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for the year 2009.