Stability and Reproducibility of an Amateur Digital Camera for Dental Photography

Abstract

Digital photography has become more technologically sophisticated and increasingly affordable in recent years. Digital imaging plus color analysis software editing by non-professional photographers has been widely used in color matching, bleaching evaluation, teaching, and fabrication of prostheses, While the typical commercially available digital camera produces satisfactory results for everyday needs, generally only sophisticated photographic equipment operated by trained photographers is suitable for intraoral photography. In this study, we evaluated the reproducibility and stability of a widely available amateur digital camera in an extraoral situation with a constant light source (D65) and in an intraoral situation using various light sources (D65 a ring flash), The extraoral photographic results showed a highly effective database of clinical pictures compiled even with the amateur digital camera. However, the intraoral experiment showed that the different light sources had significantly different effects on the results, We suggest that the extraoral photographic method we used in this study has good color stability and exceptional reproducibility. However, for intraoral photography, different light sources can produce different effects on the values or brightness of the image.