What Is a Camera?

Video Transcript

"Hi I'm Rokosz, your digital lifestyle expert and we're discussing what is a camera? Well what is a camera? Well a camera is loosely defined or specifically defined as any instrument that records an image. Now the blur between a camera that we know back in the day 35 millimeter film and a movie camera or a moving picture camera, the lines are completely blurring. So in very many ways in the sense that you're going to find your still cameras, still digital cameras having the ability to take a moving image. In fact our HD still camera can take a high definition moving picture with it. Not great to use as a camcorder because it's very difficult to change and effect things with a fixed lens camera like that. But on the flip side now, we've been finding that even very expensive Nikon style cameras with changeable, removable lenses that produce those very beautiful pictures have the ability to send out a high definition feed. So what have we learned? We've learned on one side you can have a very expensive what we consider to be a still digital camera can produce video and vice versa, a video camera can capture one still image. In fact that's almost a fallacy now because as we learned about video, video is broken up into frames or pictures. Let me show you an example here. From here this could be a sheet of negatives from your old 35 millimeter camera or in reality what it is is the final cellulose of a major motion picture. If you look at it, again major motion pictures most of them that aren't digitally distributed are distributed in a 35 millimeter format meaning that the width of this is 35 millimeter, very similar again to your 35 millimeter cameras except that for every second, it takes 24 pictures or 24 images. So a moving camera or a moving picture camera whether it be digital or film is really just a lot of images at the same time. So that's how they coincide and now in this digital age it's very important to understand that most digital cameras now will pickup around 30 frames in a second. So again, what they were finding there with these bigger cameras is that they have the ability to take in this digital information and take it in and a lot of information. So as we wrap up, remember a camera is something that can take a single still image and a video camera is something that takes a lot of them per second. I'm Rokosz, your digital lifestyle expert."