Week 7- Digital Technologies

In class this week we learned about digital technologies.

In today's society more and more of technology is becoming digitalized. However not too long ago analog technology was all that was available to us. Information given to us in analog form is a copy of the information and can be electronic, chemically induced, magnetic, or vibration sensitive. Digital on the other hand, is taking the original material and converting it into binary code(1's and 0's). Digital technology has become handy in many areas, including photography and video.

Digital photography uses a device called a Charged Coupling Device which converts image being capture into numerical data by capturing light. The more pricey camera which have better resolution have a larger CCD than a small point and shoot. However the better the resolution means having more pixels which means that the image you captured will take up more room wherever you decide to store it on your computer or memory card. There are many advantages though, remember when you had to develop the film to see if your picture came out okay? Well with digital photography one can immediately view what they have shot, there are no developing charges, manipulating the image is easier, and at a low resolution, you can store a lot of information.
Digital video is described in the powerpoint as electronic storage of moving images using numerical data. By using the numeric system, one can easily take the video shot straight from the camera and begin editing. If more space is needed, videos can be compressed. This means that certain information in the video, like color, motion, etc. is removed. Unfortunately, when this occurs the video losses quality.
PDA's or Personal Digital Assistants have a multitude of functions, but act as a small computer, phone, organizer, of data storage device. PDA's can help access the internet from a variety of locations, collect and graph real world data, etc.

We also learned about Podcasts which are digital media, audio, or video files that are released periodically and different audio file formats such as uncompressed, lossy, and lossless compression.

As a telecommunication major we have to be up to date on all the newest digital technologies. We had to learn all about CCD's, resolution, pixels, and compression in class. We also record digital video only on an analog medium, tape. This means that when editing, we have to go through the whole tape(log and capture) and can not just jump around and choose to edit shots in the middle of the tape. Back in the day when analog was used, it had to be processed in a dark room so not to disturb the video that was captured on it because the film was light sensitive. Digital has certainly made things in my field a lot easier and faster.

The first article I found gives a little more detail to the difference between analog and digital and how analog is a continuous stream of information while digital breaks up the information.

Digital vs. Analog

The second article is interesting because it compares digital and analog in terms of audio. It discusses how analog and digital have affected recordings of songs. The article uses examples of classic vinyl records and how you can hear noise in the analog recordings.

Music-Digital vs Analog