The Savitzky-Golay (SG) filters are generally used for smoothing and differentiation in many fields. The properties of the SG smoothing filters have been well studied. However, the properties of the SG differentiation filters or SG digital differentiators (SGDD, for the first order differentiation) are not developed well somehow, although they have been widely used. In the paper, the properties of the SGDD are discussed in detail. The effects of the SGDD on a noise-free single Gaussian line and a noise-free Gaussian doublet are studied via simulation. The results indicate that the contrast and resolution loss of the SGDD depends on the ratio of the width of signal derivative and filter length. The linear SGDD is not preferable for preserving small details of signal derivative from this study. The cubic and quintic SGDD with the choice of appropriate filter length are recommended in order to maintain the resolution of signal derivative.