Gadgetory

whether it's snapping pictures of a new family member to share on social media recording footage to upload for co-workers or just taking a selfie for fun with the girls having a night on the town it cannot be disputed that digital photography has become standard to our modern way of living and while we take for granted but pretty much anyone can produce a phone that is spilling over with pictures of small humans and animals they adore have you ever stopped to think what makes all of this possible well even if you didn't the answer is image sensors and thanks to them we are now able to capture high-quality photos and videos more directly into a digital format for easy usage and instead of going through the cumbersome extra steps that we did historically you see kids back in the days of the ancient Pharaoh's cameras used a specialized light-sensitive plastic substance to capture images projected onto it through a lens known as phlegm excuse me film you took a roll of it to the local chemist who developed it and gave you physical pictures which if you wanted to upload to your geo city site needed to be scanned in a scanner now instead of using film to capture images today's digital sensors work hard to artificially mimic the transduction process of a biological eye in order to do all this in a much more simple fashion well sort of simple transduction simply defined is the conversion of one energy form into another and whether this comes as a result of an organic or mechanical means is actually completely irrelevant so the human eye rod and cone receptors work in combination with ganglion cells to convert photons into an electrochemical signal which the occipital lobe in your brain can then process in the case of an image sensor though photons are captured as charged electrons in silicon and converted to a voltage value through the use of capacitors and amplifiers then later transfer it into digital code which can be processed by a computer while there are many ways of going about this most sensors operate in a similar manner to one another with the big difference that splits them being the way in which they process stimuli all these many types there are two more readily available in mature forms of sensors CCD and CMOS charge coupled device sensors work by regice during photon rays in silicon which contains a grid array of pixels after electron charges are captured in this pixel array they're then processed from the bottom to the top of the grid into a serial shift register and pushed out a single charge at a time to be converted into an analog voltage that is then transformed into coding by way of an analog to digital converter since these sensors operate by processing charges individually across the lines of an array this system utilizes a respectable amount of power to function but this also gives it the benefit of being extremely low noise due to the minimized use of voltage amplifiers often making them better for particular types of photography such as aerial or space this of course brings us to complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor x' which are the type of image sensor most commonly found in consumer grade products as I stated earlier most image sensors operated in a generally similar fashion so what makes these different from the CCD sensors just described is that instead of shuffling electron charges along an array to then be modified extra circuitry has been added to each pixel which allows it to do more or less all the processing individually with the signal then being sent directly down the line to the CPU since there's no gridlock to be managed in this operation the power usage is actually reduced simultaneously with the added benefit of an increase in processing speed now well both of these sensor types have done well and continue to develop in their own sort of respective specialized fields that's not to say that there isn't any room for future improvements though modern sensors have been wise in taking their inspiration from biology the processors which reconstruct the coded images sent to them have a ways to catch up if they want to give our brains a run for their money I mean you see the current answer to improving image quality in electronics is to increase pixel counts and fine-tune photo or sensor sensitivities when the fact is that the eye that we use to sit in judgment of all this stuff is correctly focused in a whopping 2% of our visual field or about twice the size of your thumbnail at arm's reach meaning our brain is doing a lot of the work at picking up the slack but unless we want to resort to care around Xerox machines with us whatever we wish to share our important images then they'll just have to serve us in the mean time speaking of important images if you want to create a site to host your important images of your family or your business or whatever else you should check out Squarespace their templates are simple it's powerful to manage they're absolutely beautiful 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website today you get two weeks and when and if you decide to sign up for Squarespace permanently you can use offer code Lynas to get 10% off your first purchase so thanks to Squarespace for sponsoring this episode of fast as possible thanks to you guys for watching it liked this video if you liked it dislike it if you thought it sucked and leave a comment if you have suggestions for future fast as possible just like this one and as always don't forget to subscribe