7.1 Making Sure the Left Hand Knows What the Right Hand Is Doing

It would be nice if we could simply take the best light source, the best optics, and the best sensor and put them all together to get the best camera. Unfortunately, that would be like taking the best player for each position from a pool of professional football teams and assuming that you have automatically created the next Super Bowl championship team. As coaches know, the interaction between players is a critical part of a winning team, and the same is true with digital camera design. The optics and sensor need to be designed together to create the best camera for the intended purpose, such as family photos or stellar astronomy, within given constraints, such as size and cost. This approach to designing the system as a whole is called systems engineering, and it considers how the individual parts work together to create the best image with the existing light and motion present when snapping the picture. First, we will look at the effects of motion blur on image quality, then, we will see how this influences the design of the optics and sensor.