Both digital photography and traditional film based photography are based on certain fundamental ideas like capturing the image through a lens, use of a shutter to achieve it etc. The main difference between the two lies in how the image coming through the lens is converted and stored. In the mean time, I will be highlighting the various benefits of digital photography to the mankind over the tradional film based photography technology.

In conventional photography, the incoming light rays react with the chemical coating on the film and forms an image which is then developed in a dark room into a negative. This negative is turned into a positive by passing light through them on to a light sensitive paper which results in the photograph this is not the case as the digital photography..

The process of capturing the image is totally different in digital photography. The light coming through the lens falls on electronic sensors made of Charge Coupled Devices (CCD) which convert the light into electrical impulses.The screen on which the image is captured comprises millions of pixels or picture elements which each pixel being a CCD. These impulses are processed instantaneously, converted to digital image and displayed on the screen as well as stored in memory or other storage devices, and this is one of the many benefits associated with the digital photography, since it does nt need any film before any images can be formed and it does not cost much in terms of image processing time and amount needed for it production.

Another benefit of digital photography is owing to the fact that the quality of digital images is measured in terms of the number of pixels or the resolution of the screen. A typical computer monitor has a screen resolution of 800x600 which means that the monitor can display 800 pixels from left to right and 600 from top to bottom. The total number of pixels adds up to 480 000 in this case. The resolution of the background screen in digital photography is much higher of the order of Mega pixels and this is another major benefit of digital photography.. The image size can be anywhere between 1.8 and 13.1 mega pixels depending on the quality of camera.

Im digital photography the range of colors is dependent on the bit size per pixel. For example 8 bits per pixel can store up to 255 shades of black and white pictures. 16 bits per pixel can have up to 65,536 shades of color while 24 bits per pixel can have 16 million color combinations. Most modern digital cameras for general use operate with 24 bits per pixel size while some of the professional ones can have 48 bits per pixel meaning 280 billion color combinations.

In addition to the benefits of digital photography cited above, in digital photography the quality of pictures printed is dependent on the number of pixels per inch of the photograph. The higher the number, the better the quality of the digital photograph. Most photos printed in photography labs have 300 pixels per inch of print resolution. Thus the biggest picture that can be printed with a 2 mega pixels camera is 5.8 inches by 3.8 inches size while a 4 mega pixels camera can print 8.2 inches by 5.4 inches size photos. These are the photo sizes with 300 pixels per inch print resolution.