What is a digital graphics computer system?

Below is my work for P1, covering the hardware elements of a digital graphics computer. The next post will explain the basic software elements of P1.

Mouse
The mouse is an important device when manipulating digital graphics. This is because it can change the screen resolution and select different things on the screen. A better mouse has far more control over doing things in detail than an ordinary mouse. A mouse with a higher DPI means that it is a lot more accurate than an ordinary mouse.

Monitor
The monitor is the device which you view things on. You can change your resolution on a monitor so that the quality is better. A higher resolution makes the quality better. For example 1024 by 768 is not as good as 1280 by 1024.

Graphics Tablet
A graphics tablet is something that you can draw on using a stylus. The stylus is like a pen and is very accurate for drawing. These are much more favoured by designers.

Digital Camera
A digital camera is a high quality camera with lots of pixels. Having more pixels on a camera means that the quality will be higher. These cameras cost a lot of money generally but are much better than something with a low amount of mega pixels. For example a camera can have 8 mega pixels. This means it has 8 million pixels on the camera.

Scanner
A scanner is a device that is used to scan documents and pictures. It is a human interface piece of equipment. You can scan in different resolutions to make the quality better or worse. It imports the document as a bitmap so it has all the colours that it has when it is on the paper.

Flash Cards
A flash card is a device that is used to store data on a small device. A flash card is very small and can store a small amount of data. They can store for example around 1gb and 2gb.

USB Storage Device
A USB storage device is something that plugs into the USB ports in the computer. It can store various sizes of data. From 256mb to around 8gb on a small stick. This is a great way of storing data and if the where the data is primarily stored gets lost you will always have a backup of it on the USB storage device.

The following hardware components affect the performance of a computer system used to manipulate digital graphics:

Hard Drive
This can affect the performance by not having a lot of space left on it. If there is little space left on the hard drive then the computer will be slowed down as it uses this space for other things running in the background. It will have less room to think and will therefore slow it down as well.

Graphics Card
This can affect the performance by not being able to run certain applications well. For example, if you are running a large photoshop file then you would want the graphics card to be able to load all of the different colours in the file. If the computer is running slowly when there is a lot of colour on the screen, then it may be time to buy a new graphics card.

Processor
This can affect the performance by not being able to load programs fast enough. High end programs will require more processing power and if you have a slow processor then the program would take for ever to load. You would need to buy a new processor if this was the case.

RAM
Having more RAM means that there is more memory for other things to use. Also having more RAM means that programs will run faster as the RAM can be told to be used on that program only.