How Digital Cameras Tidy Up
Most of the time dust is not a major threat to photography. In the darkroom, photographers have always tried to keep dust off negatives
and photo paper while making enlargements. But if a mote here or there escaped their attention, there was no great harm done. Digital
SLR cameras are different. When a photographer changes lenses, he opens up the door to dust and the camera’s electrical signals invite
dust to party on an image sensor that is often a faction of the size of a film frame. Because
most digital sensors are smaller than a film frame, what would be negligible dust on film
swells to the size of boulders, relatively speaking, when it’s on the surface of a
digital camera’s sensor. Olympus was the first to find a way
to tell dust to take a powder.
(^136) PART 2 HOW DIGITAL CAMERAS CAPTURE IMAGES
In the Olympus EVOLT E-300 and E-330, a clear, optical class filter in a round, metal frame sits between the camera’s shutter
1 and the image sensor that captures a photo.