SLRs didn't have leaf shutters in the film days either. There's a few reasons for that. Firstly leaf shutters tend not to allow high shutter speeds unless you want massive vignetting, generally ...

A rolling shutter on a camera exposes an image by scanning one section at a time instead of capturing a scene all at once. Mechanical focal plane shutters, at the fastest shutter speeds, will scan an ...

The Part 1 of this series about digital camera design has shown how to do the basic calculations that interrelate pixel size, focal length, focal ratio, and spot size, and demonstrated how these ...

Leica's new DSLR, the S2, has 37.5 megapixels. When I read that, I actually shouted out loud. "What?!" Upon further reading, though, I saw that the sensor onto which these pixels have been affixed is ...

Scientific American is part of Springer Nature, which owns or has commercial relations with thousands of scientific publications (many of them can be found at www ...

Get your news from a source that’s not owned and controlled by oligarchs. Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily. A couple of days ago I wrote about the mystery of why my camera refuses to let me set ...