Tuesday, May 27, 2008

TECHNICAL DESCRIPTION 2...

Tutorial Two: Digital Camera use and applications

“A new technology is rarely superior to an old one in every feature”. Briefly discuss this statement in relation to digital camera technology. What would you consider to be some of the pluses and minuses digital camera technology holds in relation to more traditional film based cameras?

POSITIVES:

  • Can delete pictures if they aren’t right
  • Doesn’t take up a lot of storage space
  • Small and compact
  • Easy to put on your computer
  • Instant pictures
  • Print at home

NEGATIVES:

  • Don’t have the joy of getting a film developed not knowing what the pictures are.
  • Quite technical
  • Expensive

List some of the ways that digital images can be stored transferred and manipulated using other communications technology.

  • Computer hard drive
  • CD’s
  • DVDs
  • USB

Given the prevalence of image capturing devices, and thinking about the issues discussed in tutorial one, consider what sort of ethical issues may arise with their use.

Un wanted people can access your images.

Other peoples faces in pictures that may not have wanted to be in the picture – privacy issues.

Briefly discuss some of the ways that digital images could, or are, being used in occupational therapy practice.

In occupational therapy practice digital cameras are used to get photos of client’s current environments so then they can see how they can modify them. E.g. a photo of the front door to see what ramp, rails or new gradient of the steps.

Provide a brief summary of the services offered by Flickr.com

Flickr.com is a website where you can upload photo’s and send the link to friends and family so they can view your pictures online. Also used to store pictures.

Name one other photo storage website which offers a service similar to Flickr.com

Ringo: www.ringo.com

Explain what the difference is between a digital and an optical zoom

Most cameras have both optical zoom and digital zoom. Optical zoom works just like a zoom lens on a film camera. The lens changes focal length and magnification as it is zoomed. Image quality stays high throughout the zoom range. Digital zoom simply crops the image to a smaller size, then enlarges the cropped portion to fill the frame again. Digital zoom results in a significant loss of quality as is clear from the examples below. It's pretty much a last resort, and if you don't have it in camera, you can do a similar job using almost any image editing program.

Explain what is meant by the term mega pixel

One of the main ways that manufacturers categorize their digital cameras is in terms of pixel count. What this is is the number of individual pixels that go into making each image. Today this number varies between 1 million (1 Megapixel) to around 14 million (14 Megapixels). A million pixels is abbreviated to MP, so a 1MP camera has 1 million pixels and a 3MP camera has 3 million pixels.






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