TRENDnet TV-PC350 Manual - Page 13

Appendix: VIDEO CONFERENCE GLOSSARY CMOS image sensor - CMOS (abbreviated for Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor) is similar to CCD with different silicon process in production. The advantage of CMOS is low power consumption, low production cost and small in chipset dice. The cons are lacking of noise immunity, which leads to less sensitivity in image quality. The modern silicon technology, however, can improve the signal-to-noise ratio significantly. Major suppliers of CMOS sensor are: OmniVision, VLSI Vision, Rockwell, Sharp, HP, Sony, and EleVision with resolution start from 80,000, 250,000 to 1,000,000 pixels. Digital PC Camera - Digital PC camera, on t he other hand, sends the digitized video signal, so-called YUV format, directly to your PC through parallel port, COM port, USB port, Fast Ethernet or IEEE 1394 interface. CCIR 601, a digital TV encoding standard, defines video digitized signal in YUV 4:4:4, or YUV 4:2:2 format. A corresponding driver in PC will decode and translate the data into correct color for splay. Digital camera is dedicated, but not limited, for PC applications today. The most popular interface today are parallel port and USB port. Image DSP - Image DSP is used to deal with the image and color captured and ensure sharpness of color displayed on monitor. Image DSP can control white balance, hue and saturation of RGB color, gamma value for color adjustment. Different algorithms are implemented in DSP to provide such functions. Some silicon suppliers has already integrate DSP together with image sensor as one-chip solution for cost-down reason, while others implement compression engine in image DSP to speed up the data transmission rate.