Spectrum of digital camera lenses

By Jakob Jelling
Snapjunky.com

A very important part of any camera, be it a digital camera or an ordinary conventional camera, is the lens! It is like a vital organ of a living creature, just like the eye of an animal, and thus much care has to be taken regarding the lens, it's selection and uses. Also, not much of the users who use digital cameras, are quite oblivious about the proper information about the lenses. Thus here is a kind of brief introductory discussion that would benefit every digital camera user, or anyone interested in purchasing a digital camera.

A spectrum of variety exists for the digital-camera lenses; from tiny, built-in fixed-focal-length plastic lenses to glass made big and removable zoom lenses with special optical coatings. To name a few are, Fixed-focal-length lenses, retractable zoom lenses, fixed zoom lenses and interchangeable lenses. Every lens variety sways the by and large design and features of the digital camera using it. Looking at each such type and their advantages and uses corresponding to the digital camera helps achieve a greater understanding of the device in further facets.

Firstly discussing the fixed-focal-length lenses! These lenses cannot provide any optical zoom. They provide more of auto focus rather than fixed focus, along with selectable macro and landscape focus modes. Yet these lenses are much economic and virtually inexpensive in nature & cost and predominantly used by amateurs or snap shot picture taking by tourists and casual travelers. The Fixed-focal-length lenses have a lot of advantages in digital camera design. They help in compact or mega compact camera designs, as well as very fast operations of the digital camera, due to its simple nature. However they also provide a wide angle of view, so the photograph is not compromised and group photographs or scenery shots are taken up quite well. However compared to other types of lenses these fixed-focal-length lenses have the lowest optical quality and also far away zoom features are not available. However in a combination of all the advantages and disadvantages these lenses are quite suitable in their own way.

Next looking at the retractable zoom lenses. These zoom lenses withdraw (retract, so is the name) into the box or body of the camera when the camera is switched-off and extend when it's switched-on. These retractable zoom lenses also help a lot in very compact, portable camera design and are also very suitable for amateurs or snap shot picture taking by tourists and casual travelers. Moreover the lenses have an extra security of being covered, when not in use, in these retractable zoom lenses and are safer to use by any kind of user. These lenses too have a few disadvantages, like for example they do not sustain the use of lens converters or filters. They have limited ranges of the limit of 2X or 3X magnification maximum. Yet again, they are quite useful and popular in their own special way.

Now taking a trip towards a different kind of lens, the fixed zoom lenses! These can be attached to lens converters into the digital camera and the majority of fixed zoom lenses can be used for wide-angle, close-up, or even telephoto shooting. These fixed zoom lenses remain fixed to the camera box and cannot retract but they are very popular due to the fact that they have higher ranges of zooms, like about 12X magnification. They support the use of filters as well as ring flashes to take up a professional get-up. However these fixed zoom lenses too have a few disadvantages. They are large and bulky and their operations are complicated, rather than the simpler versions of lenses discussed above.

Lastly comes the interchangeable lens! These have good amount of applications in digital SLR cameras too. These can be disengaged from the camera box and replaced with whichever other preferable lens anytime. These interchangeable lenses guarantee the best quality images for digital photography and also very flexible in handling. Yet as a few disadvantages, these interchangeable lenses are costly, as well as heavy and bulky. They are also somewhat complicated to operate.

Here we have thus discussed almost a good quantity of topics regarding the digital camera lenses. This information are made in such a manner to help both the trained as well as the untrained digital camera users to advantage even a bit more over whatever knowledge they already possess!