In this article we are going to explain different types of input devices. An input device is a special type of peripheral device that allows communication along with the processing unit of the computer system. A computer’s input devices are mostly to be used for recognizing the input data that are provided by users for solving their problems. Input data has many variants, like text, images, audio, and video. These input devices allow transferring data from input devices to the computer system.
Different Types of Input Devices
There are different types of input devices:
- Pointing Devices
- Game Controller Devices
- Audio Input Devices
- Audio Output Devices
- Visual and Imaging Devices
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Pointing Device
These are primary input devices because pointing devices create the input interface; with the help of this interface, users help to control and feed the instructions to the PC using physical handheld moving devices like a mouse and more. Control all positions of the pointer on the screen of the monitor using pointing devices.
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Game Controller Devices
These types of devices are designed for playing games with a connection to a computer or other gaming system console. The main role of game controller devices is to control all individual objects and characters in your game.
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Audio Input Devices
With the help of audio input devices, users can send audio instructions to a computer for different tasks such as processing, recording, and more. Many audio input devices work with speech recognition programs, because this software helps to translate spoken words into text documents.
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Audio Input/Output Devices
Some functionality is required for audio and video to be converted into hearable voices that our ears can hear. This functionality may be special hardware and processing systems, and this task can be fulfilled by “audio output devices“.
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Visual and Imaging Devices
Visual and imaging devices allow the user to provide input to the computer in the form of images and visuals.
- Webcam: This device is used to capture the real-time image, and it connects to a computer.
- Digital Camera: The Digital camera is able to store all images and videos in digital form (memory chip) instead of on film (reel).
- Digital Camcorder: Digital camcorder devices are able to record all video in real motion.
- Biometric Scanner: Biometric scanner devices are designed for security purposes, because these devices are capable of identifying the persons.
- Barcode Reader: Biometric scanner devices are designed for security purposes, because these devices are capable of identifying the persons.
Functions of Input Devices
To obtain all different types of data from various input devices, such as keyboards, which can allow only alphanumeric information, and tracking devices, which feed spatial information, and convert all data into machine language like the 0, 1 form. Finally, calculated data are provided to computer memory.
A computer’s input devices are electromechanical devices thathelp to users for allowing input into the computer system. But computers are not able to understand these data, so input devices help to convert this data into a machine-readable format that can be easily understood by the computer system, and this translated data is stored in main memory and then finally transferred to the Central Processing Unit (CPU) for later processing.
Uses of Input Devices
There are few essential uses of input devices, such as
- To receive data from users for further processing
- To convert the provided data into binary form, like as (0’s and 1’s).
- To broadcast the converted data into the primary memory of computer