A picture is not worth a thousand words!!!

Personally, I dont think that a picture nowdays is worth a thousand words. Take a look at the picture below. How many words is it worth???

This picture is worth more than a million words...Why???

In digital imaging, we have a term called the 'picture element' or commonly refered to as the pixel. When you snap a photo using your digital camera, what you're actually doing is exposing an array of pixels arranged in an x-y grid to various light intensity levels from the scene you wish to capture. Each pixel then registers these intensity levels as a voltage drops in each corresponding pixel. The amount of voltage drop in each pixel corresponds directly to the brightness in the scene you wish to capture. After your digital camera makes that digitized click sound, you would have a voltage representation of the scene you just captured. Not a piture yet.

Greay Scale

If a picture is developed from these raw voltage levels, you'd get a black and white image of the scene. This is called the gray scale image. The reason is voltage levels simply dont represent color. To get a color image, RGB filters are placed on each pixel in a Bayer Pattern thus each pixel detects either red, green or blue light causing a corresponding voltage drop for that color. However if you extract only the red,blue or green pixels, you'd still get a gray scale image simply because voltage does not contain color information. You'd have to process all three R,G,B pixel voltages through a process called Bayer Interpolation to form your color picture. This works because each R,G,B pixel's voltage drop is proportional to the R,G,B color intensity from the scene. Remember the color filter I told you about??? But all of this can only be done when the picture is made into words...

Bayer Interpolated Color Image

Now for the word. To actually develop an image or store the images, your digital camera would digitize the raw pixel voltage levels into 14 or 16 bit digital data. Each string of digitized pixel data corresponds to a digital word. Now we see one pixel is worth one digital word. Thus if you have a 1.3 megapixel camera, your picture is worth 1,300,000 words... Thats how many words the picture in this blog entry is worth.

This picture is worth it!!!

Todays pictures are not worth a thousand words anymore. Literally, they're worth more. If a picture is worth merely a thousand words, the picture would be extremely dull... Get the picture???