Digital Still Cameras at a Glance
Kenji Toyoda · 2017
This chapter describes briefly the basic concepts of digital still cameras and the history of digital and analog electronic cameras. An image can be described by "variation of light intensity or rate of reflection as a function of position on a plane." A camera is a piece of equipment that captures an image and records it, where "to capture" means to convert the information contained in an image to corresponding signals that can be stored in a reproducible way. Naturally, the electronic photography system needs another device to store the image signals. The idea of taking pictures electronically has existed for a long time. One of the earliest concepts was shown in a patent application filed by a famous semiconductor manufacturer, Texas Instruments Incorporated, in 1973. Another interesting item of note on Polaroid's concept is that this camera had a built-in color printer.