In practice, the continuous signal is sampled using an analog-to-digital converter (ADC), a non-ideal device with various physical limitations. This results in deviations from the theoretically perfect reconstruction capabilities, collectively referred to as distortion.
Various types of distortion can occur, including:
* Aliasing. A precondition of the sampling theorem is that the signal be bandlimited. However, in practice, no time-limited signal can be bandlimited. Since signals of interest are almost always time-limited (e.g., at most spanning the lifetime of the sampling device in question), it follows that they are not bandlimited. However, by designing a sampler with an appropriate guard band, it is possible to obtain output that is as accurate as necessary.
* Integration effect or aperture effect. This results from the fact that the sample is obtained as a time average within a sampling region, rather than just being equal to the signal value at the sampling instant. The integration effect is readily noticeable in photography when the exposure is too long and creates a blur in the image. An ideal camera would have an exposure time of zero. In a capacitor-based sample and hold circuit, the integration effect is introduced because the capacitor cannot instantly change voltage thus requiring the sample to have non-zero width.
* Jitter or deviation from the precise sample timing intervals.
* Noise, including thermal sensor noise, analog circuit noise, etc.
* Slew rate limit error, caused by an inability for an ADC output value to change sufficiently rapidly.
* Quantization as a consequence of the finite precision of words that represent the converted values.
* Error due to other non-linear effects of the mapping of input voltage to converted output value (in addition to the effects of quantization).
The conventional, practical digital-to-analog converter (DAC) does not output a sequence of dirac impulses (such that, if ideally low-pass filtered, result in the original signal before sampling) but instead output a sequence of piecewise constant values or rectangular pulses. This means that there is an inherent effect of the zero-order hold on the effective frequency response of the DAC resulting in a mild roll-off of gain at the higher frequencies (a 3.9224 dB loss at the Nyquist frequency). This zero-order hold effect is a consequence of the hold action of the DAC and is not due to the sample and hold that might precede a conventional ADC as is often misunderstood. The DAC can also suffer errors from jitter, noise, slewing, and non-linear mapping of input value to output voltage.
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