It helps when learning to use your new digital camera to also know what some of the more common terms are. Below you will find many of these common terms outlined.
Automatic Mode
A setting to set the focal point, exposure and white-balance automatically.
Burst mode or uninterrupted capture Mode
a sequential series of pictures taken at quick intervals with one press of the shutter button.
Compression
The procedure of compacting digital data, images and text by deleting selected information. More... / Hide...
Digital Zoom
Cropping and magnifying the center portion of a picture.
JPEG
The dominant format used to compress images in digital cameras
Lag time
The time difference measured from when the shutter button is pressed to when camera actually captures the image
LCD (Liquid-Crystal Display)
is a small screen on a digital camera for viewing images.
Lens
A round and transparent glass or plastic piece used to aggregate light and focus it on the sensing elements when shooting a picture.
Megabyte (MB)
A unit of measurement that is equals to 1024 Kilobytes, and refers to the amount of information stored. It is indicates how much information is stored in a file, memory card, hard drive or disk.
Pixels
Color dots that make up a digital picture. Pixels are also used to measure digital resolution. One million pixels equal one mega-pixel.
RGB
In computer jargon, RGB is an abbreviation for red, green and blue. The primary colors red, green and blue colors are mixed in varying proportion to create all other colors.
Resolution
Camera resolution describes the number of pixels used to make the picture. This determines the details a camera can capture. The more pixels a camera has, the more detail it can record. Larger picture can consequently be printed.
Storage card
The removable storage device that keeps images taken with the camera. You can liken it to film but it takes much less space. It is also known as a digital camera memory card.
Viewfinder
The "window" you look through when composing the scene.
White balance
White balancing adjusts the camera for varying types of light (daylight, fluorescent, incandescent, etc.,) or lighting conditions. This compensation makes the picture looks normal to the human eye.