What is the "lens"?

What is the "lens"?

Mark Comon (Vice President, Paul's Photo, Torrance, CA) gives expert video advice on: Can a digital camera capture high-quality video?; Can a cell phone capture high-quality stills?; Can a video camcorder capture high-quality digital stills? and more...

With digital camera picture quality, the camera lens is probably the most important single part or component of a camera that you own. Most people think a lot of times about buying a camera and then decide heavily on which camera they want. They look at the features and then they buy whatever lens is on sale, and I think that's a mistake, because the lens is clearly the most important part of a camera. It's the eyes to the camera. If you think about yourself and how you would react to the world with bad eyes versus good eyes; the lens is the eyes, and the better the eyes, the better the picture that you're going to take. The lens of a camera work just as our eyes do, there's a glass lens that focuses the light, the better the lens focuses the light, the clearer the picture you will have. It focuses the light of course to the imaging chip you have in your digital camera; otherwise it focuses on the film in a film camera.