Meaning & use
digital capture
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Meanings
noununcountabletechnical
The process of recording images, sound or data in electronic form rather than on film or paper.
Grammar: Uncountable: talk about digital capture in general, not 'a digital capture'.
Patterns
- digital capture of something
- digital capture technology
- high-quality digital capture
The museum uses digital capture to make its oldest manuscripts available online.
Modern digital capture of sound gives far cleaner recordings than tape ever did.
Their team specializes in the digital capture of historical maps.
nouncountabletechnical
A single electronic recording of an image, sound or piece of data.
Grammar: Countable when you mean one individual recording: a digital capture, several digital captures.
Patterns
- a digital capture of something
- make a digital capture
- store digital captures
Each digital capture is saved with a time and location stamp.
The software compares two digital captures of the same painting to spot tiny changes.
Common combinations
- digital capture technology
- Digital capture technology has made film cameras almost obsolete.
- high-resolution digital capture
- The survey needed high-resolution digital capture of every stone.
- digital capture of data
- The digital capture of data at the factory gate speeds up shipping.
- a digital capture of something
- She showed us a digital capture of the original letter.
Synonyms and how they differ
- scanning
- Used mainly for flat documents and images; digital capture is broader and includes cameras, audio and sensors.
- digitization
- Focuses on converting something that already exists into digital form, while digital capture can mean recording something for the first time.
Opposites
Word family
Commonly confused: digital capture or digitalization?
digital capture vs digitalization
Digitalization usually means changing a whole business or system to work digitally, not the act of recording one image or sound.
Practice
Which sentence uses 'digital capture' correctly?
Choose one answer.
'Capture' is a countable noun here, so it takes a plural and 'of' before the object: three digital captures of the fossil. Option 2 uses a singular noun after 'three', option 3 uses 'capture' as a verb with the wrong word order, and option 4 is missing 'the'.
Make it your own
Write a sentence using “digital capture”, then check it and compare it with the examples above.