Types of Digital Cameras

Types of Digital Cameras

In its most basic form, a digital camera is a photographic device consisting of a lightproof box with a lens at one end, and a digital image sensor at the other in place of the traditional film plane. Advances in digital photography are fast providing a wide spectrum of features and options that can be challenging for the new digital photographer to master.

There are two basic types of digital cameras:  

Digital Single-Lens Reflex (DSLR) and 

Digital Range Finder.

Digital Single-Lens Reflex (DSLR)

This camera is named for the reflexing mirror that allows you to frame the image through the lens prior to capturing the image. As light passes through the DSLR camera’s lens, it falls onto a re-flexing mirror and then passes through a prism to the viewfinder. The viewfinder image corresponds to the actual image area. When the picture is taken, the mirror reflexes, or moves up and out of the way, allowing the open shutter to expose the digital image sensor, which captures the image. Most features on a DSLR are adjustable, allowing for greater control over the captured image. Most DSLR cameras also allow the use of interchangeable lenses, meaning you can swap lenses of different focal lengths on the same camera body.

Digital Rangefinder
There are two classes of digital rangefinder cameras:  coincident rangefinder and point-and-shoot.
Coincident Rangefinder
Unlike DLSR cameras, the coincident rangefinder does not provide the photographer with the ability to view the subject through the lens. Instead, the coincident rangefinder employs a mirror or prism that uses triangulation to unite the images seen through the viewfinder and a secondary window to bring the subject into focus. The photographer sees two images overlaid on top of one another in the viewfinder, and the image is not in focus until there is a single image. As with DSLRs, most features in a coincident rangefinder are adjustable, allowing for maximum control over the captured image. An advantage to using a coincident rangefinder over a DSLR is that the lack of a reflexing mirror significantly reduces camera shake. Camera shake is due to hand movement or the vibration of the reflexing mirror found in a DSLR, and can cause blurring of the image.



Digital Point-and-Shoot
This is a lightweight digital camera, aptly named after the two steps required of the photographer to capture an image. Basically, point-and-shoot cameras require pointing the camera and taking the picture without manually adjusting settings such as the aperture, shutter speed, focus, and other settings that professional photographers routinely set on more sophisticated cameras. Of course, some point-and-shoot digital cameras do include adjustable aperture and shutter settings. Point-and-shoot digital cameras are generally light and small, have built-in automatic flash, require no adjusting of focus, and most often include an LCD display that allows you to view the image through the lens in real time via the digital image sensor. Most manufacturers of point-and-shoot cameras separate the viewfinder from the lens assembly to simplify construction and achieve a compact size. The lens, aperture, and shutter are one assembly, irremovable from the camera itself. 

because rangefinder cameras separate the optical path between the viewfinder and the lens assembly, optical compression and frame indicators (guidelines) are used to approximate the image’s frame. This approximation often causes subtle differences between what the photographer sees in the viewfinder and what is captured in the image. This is especially noticeable when the subject is close to the camera.