CCD: The heart of a digital camera (how a charge-coupled device works)

Bill takes apart a digital camera and explains how its captures images using a CCD (charge coupled device). He also shares how a single CCD is used with a color filter array to create colored images. This video is based on a chapter from the EngineerGuy team's latest book Eight Amazing Engineering Stories (Learn more at http://www.engineerguy.com/elements)

• Category

  Science & Technology

[qwertymnvcxz]

Could someone please explain to me the importance of the colours red, green and blue. I understand that they are "primary colours" but if the electromagnetic spectrum is just a continuum does that mean those three colours were just chosen at random? Sorry if that sounds confusing but any information or ideas would be a real help. Thanks and love the videos.

[engineerguyvideo]

RGB are three primary colors that when ADDED together make white. In principle there are any number of three color combinations that would do this, but the RGB model fits into how human perceive color, and it has was well established long before monitor. I recommend to you the wikipedia article on it. Google "RGB model wikipedia."

[Raydeus]

The one thing I've always wondered about is why so many cellphone cameras do not have an option to save the image in pixel map format and use a very compressed low-quality one instead. People argue that it is due to memory space but it just doesn't add up to not have an option that could give you a much better quality image for the space.

Does it have anything to do with the CCD itself being lower resolution than advertised?

[engineerguyvideo]

You'd need a ccd with three times as many pixels to do this ... so I'm guessing it is the cost.

[Amirul5018]

Hey Engineer Guy. I really love your channel. Can you make a video about how touchscreen works? I will really appreciate it if you willing to share your knowledge even more.

[yu jung Choi]

Thanks to this video, I finally finished the presentaion which is on science suject

[Kevin Olesik]

i thought the 3 primary colors were: red blue and yellow -not- red blue and green ... what's up with that ?

[Druidtton Darksun]

Soooo... witchcraft and rainbows.

Yea, I like my explanation better.

[Christopher Hite]

Kudos on your very well produced, interesting and informative videos. I have watched and enjoyed them all. I will definitely be taking a look at your books. Hope to see more videos in the future. Keep up the good work!

[Geo Lemay]

How does the CCD shift the charges row to row?

[Geo Lemay]

This is amazing.

[Thomas de Haas]

CMOS stands for complementary metal oxide semiconductor. It is different from a CCD in that each pixel contains both a photodetector and a transistor. This means the whole pixel is not a sensor, unlike a CCD. CMOS technology is cheaper and processes images faster, however, it has lower light sensitivity. This is why most consumer cameras these days use CMOS and fancy microscope cameras that operate at low light use CCDs.

[seklerek]

Could you make a video about how a CMOS works? Or is it the same?

[reathyork]

Sleep? There's no such thing as sleep anymore...

[Shlomi Borovitz]

Another reason why the filtering works so well, is that our eyes are much more sensitive to changes in light intensity than to changes in color - so it is very reasonable to have the color information extrapolated from much less data.