The use of digital images is one of the fastest-growing new technologies in the contemporary society. The use of this new technology in Dentistry, and especially in Orthodontics, associated with the introduction of "Digital Photography" allows the clinician to acquire things ever imagined, facilitating the orthodontic diagnosis, improving the doctor/doctor and doctor/patient communication, illustrating scientific communications in speeches, conferences and articles, being thereby, an excellent tool for teaching and research. In order to take advantages of this new field, the orthodontic records including photographs, models and radiographs must be converted into digital images. Therefore, as we enter into the "digital world", the aim of this paper is to clarify some basic concepts regarding the digital imaging and try to answer the must common questions about this topic: How to convert digitally the orthodontic records with a scanner? How to acquire digital images with a digital camera? At what resolution in DPI (dot per inch) or in Megapixel (MP), file size and file format should the images have to fulfill my usual demands? At what resolution should the images have in order to be used in the computer monitor? And what resolution should the images be imported into presentation programs in order to be displayed in multimedia projectors? And at last, how to easily acquire digital images that will be used in scientific papers?
Image; Digital Image; Imaging in Orthodontics
