The Future of Digital Cameras
Untethered, Inexpensive, and on the Internet
By Gene Wang
Many experts agree that the future of photography is digital. Digital cameras offer many benefits: Digital pictures can be emailed, browsed on Web sites, enhanced, animated, transformed into fun things like T-shirts, and saved for posterity to be shared forever. Yet digital-camera adoption is still slow to take off. Image quality is not up to snuff when compared with traditional print media, batteries run out of juice, connecting to the PC is challenging at best, and cost is still an issue. While developing next-generation hardware and software components for the digital camera devices of the future, our staff at Photo Access Corporation has learned a great deal about the underlying technology, the technical challenges and limitations, and the state of things to come. If you're trying to decide when to incorporate a digital camera into your bag of tricks, you may be interested to know that ten technologies are converging to create a digital camera of the future with compelling new features, low price, and ease of use. (See the text box entitled "Ten Converging Technologies.")
Digital Cameras Today
Digital cameras are still image-capture devices that record pictures using electronic image sensors instead of film. Light reflected from a subject passes through a lens and strikes an image sensor. The most popular image sensors today are charge-coupled devices (CCDs). These area sensors have two sections: a photo-sensing region made out of pn photo diodes, and a transfer region made out of analog shift registers.
