A digital camera back is an item of high-end digital photography equipment. Most digital cameras are built to operate as a self-contained unit. This is especially so at the lower end, where cameras usually include zoom lens and flashes that cannot be changed. However, at the highest end, the equipment is completely modular, with interchangeable lenses, bodies, and film backs. A digital camera back essentially replaces a film back in such a system. Experienced photographers attach digital camera backs to their professional medium format SLR cameras, such as a Hasselblad, or a view camera, such as a Sinar. 10 MP Nikon D200 and a Nikon film scanner The Canon EOS 350D The Canon PowerShot A95 Digital photography, as opposed to film photography, uses electronic devices to record the image as binary data. ... A Canon Inc. ... A photographic flash is a device that produces a flash of light required for indoor or other low light conditions. ... This article or section does not cite its references or sources. ... The single-lens reflex (SLR) is a type of camera that uses a movable mirror placed between the lens and the film to project the image seen through the lens to a matte focusing screen. ... Hasselblad 503CW with Zeiss Distagon 3,5/30 and Ixpress V96C Hasselblad is a Swedish manufacturer of high-quality still photography cameras based in Gothenburg, Sweden. ... The view camera is a type of camera with a very long history (some modern examples are often mistaken for antiques), but they are still used today by professional and amateur photographers who want full control of their images. ... The Swiss photographer Carl Hans Koch invented the Sinar camera in 1947. ...

History

The first digital camera back was introduced by Leaf Photography (now part of Kodak) in 1991. The Leaf DCBI, nicknamed 'The Brick', offered resolution of 4 million pixels (MP). It took another 4 years of development to then introduce the 2nd digital camera back; the DCBII, which included a live-video view. Two years later, in 1996, Leaf introduced the first 6 MP digital camera back; the Leaf Volare. From 2002, new models were introduced yearly, with rising resolution and sensor sizes, achieving today resolutions of 33MP for the new Leaf Aptus family of digital camera backs, and 39MP for Phase One and Hasselblad.

Uses

Early digital camera backs were only used in a studio to take pictures of still objects. Because they created huge amounts of data relative to the available storage mediums at the time, they had to be tethered to a computer during capture. They were using linear array sensors which could take seconds or even minutes for a complete high-resolution scan. The linear array sensor acts like its counterpart used in a flatbed image scanner by moving vertically to digitize the image. The latest one-shot digital backs, however, can keep pace with the speediest motorized medium format cameras, and they are for all practical purposes without limitations to the available shutter speeds. The availability of high-speed, high capacity memory cards have made modern digital backs into self-contained units, which makes them practical for use outside the studio as well. For a one-room apartment, see Apartment. ... In computing, a scanner is a device which analyzes a physical image (such as a photograph, printed text, or handwriting) or an object (such as ornament) and converts it to a digital image. ... Digitizing, or digitization, is the process of turning an analog signal into a digital representation of that signal. ...

Many of these cameras could originally only capture grayscale images. To take a color picture, it requires three separate scans done with a rotating colored filter. These are called multi-shot backs. Some other camera backs are using CCD arrays similar to typical cameras. These are called single-shot backs. In computing, a grayscale or greyscale digital image is an image in which the value of each pixel is a single sample. ...

Technical features

Since it is much easier to manufacture a high-quality linear CCD array that has only a few thousand pixels than a CCD matrix that has millions of them, very high resolution linear CCD camera backs were available much earlier than their CCD matrix counterparts. For example, you could buy an expensive camera back with an over 7,000-pixel horizontal resolution in the mid-1990s. As of 2006, you can buy a comparable CCD matrix camera of similar resolution, in the Phase One P45, and in the Leaf Aptus 75 digital camera backs. MCMXC redirects here; for the Enigma album, see MCMXC a. ...

Many modern digital camera backs are using very large CCD matrices. This eliminated the need of scanning. For example, Fujifilm produces a 20-million-pixel digital camera back with a 52 mm x 37 mm (2.04" x 1.45") CCD in 2003. This CCD array is a little smaller than a frame of 120 film and much larger than a 35 mm frame (36 mm x 24 mm). In comparison, a compact digital camera usually uses a so-called 1/1.8" or 7.176 mm x 5.319 mm CCD sensor. The 1/1.8" diagonal value is based on an archaic measurement originally used for TV picture tubes and doesn't even accurately identify the physical size of the sensor, hence the actual photo-sensitive area is much smaller. 2003 (MMIII) was a common year starting on Wednesday of the Gregorian calendar. ... 120 is a film format for still photography introduced by Kodak for their Brownie No. ... Simulated 35 mm film with soundtracks _ The outermost strips (on either side) contain the SDDS soundtrack as an image of a digital signal. ...