How Do Cameras Work?

Optical Engineer Kevin Quist explains how cameras work with sensors, lenses, and pixels.

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Video Transcript

(1.5s) Hey, everyone. So just about everybody these days has a high-powered camera right on their smartphone. But do you know exactly how it works?

Well, under each lens, even on the lenses on your smartphones, there is a tiny little rectangular area. Let me see if I can get it to show. There it is, called your image sensor. On your camera's image sensor, there's actually sometimes millions of even smaller squares called pixels. Now these pixels are photosensitive, that means that they can detect light. So what your camera does is it uses a lens to collect light from your image. Maybe somewhere far away to focus it all the way down onto your small little camera sensor.

Then each of the pixels has a different numerical value, you know high numbers means that there's lots of light maybe it's the lights, you know, these pixels up here have very high number values. And then the pixels on my shirt, for example, would have a lot lower pixel values. Your computer then uses that information along with a bunch of filters that are on the sensor to recreate the color and all the features of the image.

So next time you pull out your smartphone to take a picture, you'll know exactly how it works.

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