Digital photography In

Digital photography is a form of photography that uses cameras containing arrays of electronic photodetectors to capture images focused by a lens, as opposed to an exposure on photographic film. The captured images are digitized and stored as a computer file ready for further digital processing, viewing, digital publishing or printing.

Until the advent of such technology, photographs were made by exposing light sensitive photographic film and paper, which were processed in liquid chemical solutions to develop and stabilize the image. Digital photographs are typically created solely by computer-based photoelectric and mechanical techniques, without wet bath chemical processing.

Digital photography is one of several forms of digital imaging. Digital images are also created by non-photographic equipment such as computer tomography scanners and radio telescopes. Digital images can also be made by scanning other printed photographic images or negatives.

The first consumer digital cameras were marketed in the late 1990s. Professionals gravitated to digital slowly, and were won over when their professional work required using digital files to fulfill the demands of employers and/or clients, for faster turn-around than conventional methods would allow.[citation needed] Starting around 2007, digital cameras were incorporated in cellphones and in the following years cellphone cameras became widespread, particularly due to their connectivity to social media websites and email. Since 2010, the digital point-and-shoot and DSLR formats have also seen competition from the mirrorless digital camera format, which typically provides better image quality than the point-and-shoot or cellphone formats but comes in a smaller size and shape than the typical DSLR. Many mirrorless cameras accept interchangeable lenses and have advanced features through an electronic viewfinder, which replaces the through-the-lens finder image of the SLR format.

The first flyby spacecraft image of Mars was taken from Mariner 4 on July 15, 1965 with a camera system designed by NASA/JPL. It used a video camera tube followed by a digitizer, rather than a mosaic of solid state sensor elements, so it was not what we usually define as a digital camera, but it produced a digital image that was stored on tape for later slow transmission back to earth.[1][2]

The first recorded attempt at building a digital camera was in 1975 by Steven Sasson, an engineer at Eastman Kodak.[3][4] It used the then-new solid-state CCD (charge-coupled device, a high-speed semiconductor) image sensor chips developed by Fairchild Semiconductor in 1973.[5] The camera weighed 8 pounds (3.6 kg), recorded black and white images to a cassette tape, had a resolution of 0.01 megapixels (10,000 pixels), and took 23 seconds to capture its first image in December 1975. The prototype camera was a technical exercise, not intended for production.

The first true digital camera that recorded images as a computerized file was likely the Fuji DS-1P of 1988, which recorded to a 16 MB internal memory card that used a battery to keep the data in memory. This camera was never marketed internationally, and has not been confirmed to have shipped even in Japan.[citation needed]

The first commercially available digital camera was the 1990 Dycam Model 1; it also sold as the Logitech Fotoman. It used a CCD image sensor, stored pictures digitally, and connected directly to a computer for downloading images.[6][7][8]