These Animations Show How CMOS and CCD Sensors Work and How They Differ

Want to see how CMOS and CCD image sensors work and how they differ from each other? Photographer and animator Raymond Sirí created a couple of simple animations showing the basic idea of how these two sensor technologies go about capturing light, reading it, and storing the information.

The animation above showing CMOS sensor tech was used in a trial against Canon, Sirí says.

Here’s the animation he created showing how CCDs work:

As you can see, CMOS sensors capture one row of light information at a time, which causes the “rolling shutter” effect that shows up in certain situations. CCD sensors, on the other hand, captures an entire image at once (this is what’s known as a “global shutter”).

(via Raymond Sirí via Image Sensors World)