View your pictures on the 8 in. (20.3 cm) 16:9 wide screen featuring KODAK Color Science for vibrant color and crisp detail.Kodak's Quick Touch Border includes an illuminated panel of yellow lights along the border of the frame that tells you exactly where to touch - simply touch along the bottom and right hand side of the border of the frame to navigate menus.View news, weather, and sports updates to stay informed throughout the day, plus humor, horoscope, sports, traffic, and more - powered by Framechannel.Customer Review: Poor documentation. Awkward to use.
I was looking for something simple to use. This is not it. It is not intuitively obvious and the documentation is very poor. Also I can rotate a picture and it stays rotated but if I zoom a picture it reverts back to the original. This is my first experience with a digital frame so maybe I'm just a dummy but I don't recommend it. I didn't load their software because I once bought a Kodak camera and the software for that was very intrusive and annoying.
Customer Review: I like it for basic photos
When I bought this for my grandparents, I was looking for something easy. To be frank, I just wanted a flash drive port. All I had to do was plug the frame in, insert the card, and hit go. Poof! Easy as pie for grandma and grandpa. I have no intent to explore all the features that probably made this so expensive, but if you're in the same situation I am, it works. And on a Mac too. :)
If you have ever gone to buy a DSLR, you must have heard the terms CCD and CMOS. As we all know DSLRs or digital cameras in general do not use Photographic Films. In place of the Photographic Film, we have light sensing units called photographic sensors. The main two categories of sensors available are CCD or Charge Coupled Device and CMOS or Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor. Both the technologies are actually not sensors, CCD is a type of shift register and CMOS is the name given to a class of semiconductor devices.
CCD
Now, when we talk about a CCD in terms of a sensor we are actually talking about a sensor circuit that utilizes a photo active region or the region sensitive to light and a transmission region that is made from a shift register, that is the CCD part of the chip. The name of the first CCD image sensor is Fair-child. The method of manufacturing a sensor can impact the way it performs. That is, the level of doping etc determines its sensitivity. The sensitivity is not actually dependent on the CCD or the shift register but it is dependent on the photoelectric region.
Full Frame , Frame Transfer and Interline are the major architectures implemented on CCD image sensors. In a Full Frame, the whole of the image area is active , these type do not have an electronic shutter, and they need mechanical shutters like conventional cameras. Frame transfer has half of the area covered by an opaque mask and the image that falls on the active region is quickly transferred to the opaque area which is designed to be the storage area while the active region is handling another image; the image in the storage area is then transferred out. The interline architecture takes the frame transfer concept bit further by making every other column of the image sensor a storage area. This makes the transfer from active to storage very quick and thus gives the ability to have very fast electronic shutter speeds. The catch to the Interline Architecture is that the effective fill area is reduced to 50%, thus reducing image quality.
CCD from a digital camera.
Digital color cameras use a Bayer Mask over the CCD that is a filter that provides every 4 pixels as a red , a blue and two greens. The human eye is more sensitive to the color green thus we use two greens.
The information thus collected is transferred to the digital image processor on the camera that deals with the image. The pixels are composed of the information thus collected from the combined result produced by the red , blue and greens. The information in such sensor controls is transferred with the help of consecutive transition of a charge from one photosite to another and thus consecutively to the sensor.
CMOS
CMOS is a type of semiconductor chip; this type of chips have microprocessors, static ram and many such applications. The CMOS sensor, what we are interested in , is a photographic sensor chip that is built in by the CMOS semiconductor technology. The main advantage of this type of a circuit is that they have low noise and also consume less power. Both these advantages are very heavy for digital photography. Lower power consumption means more battery life, less heat, and a lot of other such advantages. The advantage of having less noise includes better quality pictures, ability to modify pictures by applying different transformation like white balancing and so on. Because the noise on the actual image is low the margin available for the image processor will be more.
The CMOS chip is like an array of cupboards that is, once exposed, the light information remains in the cupboards and can be read from each of them. In the case of the CCD, the difference is that, the cupboards are not individually open-able, we need to shift the information into specific cupboards that can actually be opened. The two images below should explain better.
CMOS
CCD
CMOS chip also uses a Bayer mask filter but, because of its design abilities, the processing is done on the chip itself to combine the information from the different colors. The CMOS chip can have most of the image processing function built on to the sensor itself; this also helps in producing compact devices. Keeping CCD and CMOS apart, we should understand that all these sensors are actually seeing in black and white and they are made to see in color by applying the Bayer filter or multiple filtered sensor or such methods.
For mobile phone camera etc, the CMOS provides the advantage of being very low power consuming. Now coming to the medium format cameras, we see that CCD is more popular in this category mainly because of the fact that till recent time, the production of CMOS was not economical and had technical limitations, but these have been overcome in the early and mid nineties.
Now, coming to the larger format cameras where the size of the sensor matters, we see that CMOS is having and edge over CCD because a larger format CMOS sensor is easier to build. Now, in all segments, CMOS has an advantage on noise and CCD has advantage of lesser cost of production. The color reproduction capacity and such things are actually dependent on the process of making the sensor and will vary from one manufacturer to another.
The quality of the specific sensor, be it CCD or CMOS, is of more importance than them being CCD or CMOS. Today, we have both CMOS and CCD type cameras in the market. The decision between CMOS and CCD is made more out of personal preference than any huge advantage on either side.
One thing to note is that CANON produce CMOS based cameras in their entry level and Nikon and most other manufactures produce CCD based cameras. This is not a correct division but, in general case, most manufacturers stick to a type of sensor mainly because they will have invested in production facilities for the same.
When selecting between the two, it is best advised to try out the available option in your budget and then decide from the results. People have their own preference when it comes to colors, saturation etc. There will be variations between the same type sensors even in different models of the same manufacturer.
To view the full articles with pictures, Visit the Link:
http://www.randomequations.com/2008/11/01/ccd-and-cmos/
Shereena Vysakh is a Pro Photography Hobbiest Blogging at RandomEquations
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