CCD Image Sensors

An image sensor is a solid-state device, the part of the camera's hardware that captures light and converts what you see through a viewfinder or LCD monitor into an image. Think of the sensor as the electronic equivalent of film.

Fundamentally, a charge coupled device (CCD) is an integrated circuit etched onto a silicon surface forming light sensitive elements called pixels. It stores and displays the data for an image in such a way that each pixel (picture element) in the image is converted into an electical charge the intensity of which is related to a color in the color spectrum. For a system supporting 65,535 colors, there will be a separate value for each color that can be stored and recovered. CCDs are now commonly included in digital still and video cameras. They are also used in astronomical telescopes, scanners, and bar code readers. These devices have also found use in machine vision for robots, in optical character recognition (OCR), in the processing of satellite photographs, and in the enhancement of radar images, especially in meteorology.