IC_DGM_Definitions2 Digital Media Terms and Definitions - Digital Media 1110 In class assignment - Stuart Heimdal 9/22/2011

Data Transfer Technology:

USB USB (Universal Serial Bus) is an industry standard developed in the mid-1990s that defines the cables, connectors and protocols used for connection, communication and power supply between computers and electronic devices. USB was designed to standardize the connection of computer peripherals, such as keyboards, pointing devices, digital cameras, printers, portable media players, disk drives and network adapters to personal computers, both to communicate and to supply electric power. It has become commonplace on other devices, such as smartphones, PDAs and video game consoles. USB has effectively replaced a variety of earlier interfaces, such as serial and parallel ports, as well as separate power chargers for portable devices. FireWire The IEEE 1394 interface is a serial bus interface standard for high-speed communications and isochronous real-time data transfer, frequently used by personal computers, as well as in digital audio, digital video, automotive, and aeronautics applications. The interface is also known by the brand names of FireWire (Apple), i.LINK (Sony), and Lynx (Texas Instruments eSata eSATAp eSATAp stands for powered eSATA. It is also known as Power over eSATA, eSATA USB Hybrid Port (EUHP), or eSATA/USB Combo. An eSATAp port combines the 4 pins of the USB 2.0 (or earlier) port, the 7 pins of the eSATA port, and optionally two 12-volt power pins. SCSI Small Computer System Interface (SCSI, /skzi/ SKUZ-ee)[1] is a set of standards for physically connecting and transferring data between computers and peripheral devices. The SCSI standards define commands, protocols, and electrical and optical interfaces. SCSI is most commonly used for hard disks and tape drives, but it can connect a wide range of other devices, including scanners and CD drives. The SCSI standard defines command sets for specific peripheral device types; the presence of "unknown" as one of these types means that in theory it can be used as an interface to almost any device, but the standard is highly pragmatic and addressed toward commercial requirements.

Capturing Data:

IC_DGM_Definitions2 Digital Media Terms and Definitions - Digital Media 1110 In class assignment - Stuart Heimdal Quantizing Quantization, in mathematics and digital signal processing, is the process of mapping a large set of input values to a smaller set such as rounding values to some unit of precision. A device or algorithmic function that performs quantization is called a quantizer. The error introduced by quantization is referred to as quantization error or round-off error. Quantization is involved to some degree in nearly all digital signal processing, as the process of representing a signal in digital form ordinarily involves rounding. Quantization also forms the core of essentially all lossy compression algorithms.

Sampling In signal processing, sampling is the reduction of a continuous signal to a discrete signal. A common example is the conversion of a sound wave (a continuous signal) to a sequence of samples (a discrete-time signal). A sample refers to a value or set of values at a point in time and/or space. A sampler is a subsystem or operation that extracts samples from a continuous signal. A theoretical ideal sampler produces samples equivalent to the instantaneous value of the continuous signal at the desired points.

Compression:
Lossy In information technology, "lossy" compression is a data encoding method that compresses data by discarding (losing) some of it. The procedure aims to minimise the amount of data that need to be held, handled, and/or transmitted by a computer. The different versions of the photo of the dog at the right demonstrate how much data can be dispensed with, and how the images become progressively coarser as the data that made up the original one is discarded (lost). Typically, a substantial amount of data can be discarded before the result is sufficiently degraded to be noticed by the user. Lossless Lossless data compression is a class of data compression algorithms that allows the exact original data to be reconstructed from the compressed data. The term lossless is in contrast to lossy data compression, which only allows an approximation of the original data to be reconstructed, in exchange for better compression rates.

IC_DGM_Definitions2 Digital Media Terms and Definitions - Digital Media 1110 In class assignment - Stuart Heimdal

General:
Bit Depth (graphics) computer graphics, color depth or bit depth is the number of bits used to represent the color of a single pixel in a bitmapped image or video frame buffer. This concept is also known as bits per pixel (bpp), particularly when specified along with the number of bits used. Higher color depth gives a broader range of distinct colors. Color depth is only one aspect of color representation (formally, the gamut: which colors can be expressed), expressing how finely levels of color can be expressed (formally, gamut depth); the other aspect is how broad a range of colors can be expressed. The RGB color model, as used below, cannot express many colors, notably saturated colors such as yellow. Thus, the issue of color representation is not simply "sufficient color depth" but also "broad enough gamut".

Bit Depth (audio) In digital audio, bit depth describes the number of bits of information recorded for each sample. Bit depth directly corresponds to the resolution of each sample in a set of digital audio data. Common examples of bit depth include CD quality audio, which is recorded at 16 bits, and DVD-Audio, which can support up to 24-bit audio.