Digital Camera's

A reason for my shortage of time this last week was a Physics presentation I have been preparing for class, we are just starting a new section about Physics in medicine and I was given digital cameras as the subject of my presentation. In Chemistry we are also studying medical topics, needless to say I was not impressed by the way Biology seems to be creeping into at least half of my subjects! But luckily I managed to avoid talking about Biology as much as possible in my presentation!

During my research for this I came across quite a few interesting things. First of all was this interactive website which was utterly hilarious to me for some reason! The colonoscopy both intrigued me and repulsed me which was a bizarre and apparently funny emotional state!

I also came across the factoid that in 1998 Sony inadvertently sold more than 700,000 camcorders that could see through clothes! Needless to say I got a little sidetracked from my original task and set up a line of parallel research to find out how it worked! It turns out that they must have accidently set the IR level too high which I can only assume means that they chose a material to make their chip that had a threshold frequency low enough that even Infra Red rays had enough energy to liberate electrons. Infra red rays are not reflected by clothes so the ray passes through the clothes and is then refelcted by the body. This means that an image is made up of the waves reflected off of a persons naked body so they appear naked in the image. Imagine buying this camera and then having to discover Sony's mistake!

Then I had to make this poster for some younger students - don't worry I didn't mention anything about nakedness!