Acronyms

This page is provided in order to give some basic definition of the abbreviations and acronyms seldom used in this blog.
It is going to be a work-in progress thing, so please help me in keeping it clean, clear and good in quality.

Cheers!

C

CCD

Charge-Coupled Device is an imaging solid-state detector, the electronic equivalent of film in the digital cameras. Ideally the best sensor type to capture light, it is still preferred in astronomical visible imaging, while CMOS are nowadays preferred in commercial cameras.

CMOS

Complementary Metal-Oxide Semiconductor is an imaging solid-state detector, the electronic equivalent of film in the digital cameras. The most renowned vendors (i.e. Nikon, Canon) prefer to use this kind of technology in their cameras instead of the more “ideal” CCD's.

D

DSLR

Digital Single-Lens Reflex are digital cameras that use a mechanical mirror system and pentaprism (or pentamirror) to direct light from the lens to an optical viewfinder on the back of the camera. DSLR's are preferred by photographers because they allow an accurate preview of framing and allow the user to choose from a variety of interchangeable lenses. Most DSLR's also have a function that allows accurate preview of depth of field. [Source: Wikipedia]

H

HDRI

High Dynamic Resolution Imaging is a technique to extend the dynamic range of an image well beyond the typical 256 levels per colour of, say, a JPEG picture.

J

JPEG

Joint Photographic Expert Group, seldom abbreviated to JPG, is the group of photography experts that established the renowned format used as a standard for image storing and compression. JPEG is a lossy compression algorithm, i.e. part of the information contained in the original image is lost during the compression/storing phase and can never be recovered again. Its greatest advantage is the ability to store most of the information format with a high compression factor (typically 1/10).

M

MTF

Modulation Transfer Function is a function evaluating the ability of a system (optical, in our case) to transmit an alternated pattern of a given frequency. The higher your system quality, the better and the tinier will be the possible reproduction of the pattern in your final picture.