Photography terminology: Crop frame versus Full frame - What is that all about? When people look into buying a camera, one factor that determines price, and quality of the images produced is if the camera is designed with a sensor that is a full-frame one or not. A full frame sensor is one that basically covers the entire back plane of the camera in the same dimensions as what a full frame of film would be. A crop-frame sensor only covers a portion of that same area. If you think of a slide projector putting an image on a wall, and covering that area with a rectangular piece of paper that covers the image corner to corner, that would be full frame. If you only covered a portion of the center of the image, and let the rest just be ignored, you get the idea about what a crop sensor does. The amount of image ignored that falls outside of the image projected is what is referred to as crop factor. If 1/3rd of the image area would fall outside the borders of your sensors coverage area, you have a crop factor of 1.3. There are different crop factors on sensors that are not full frame, meaning that they cover different portions of the full image. Basically, the larger the sensor, the higher the price, and the better results you can expect in most cases. Like everything, there are cases where a crop frame sensor has an advantage. One being that crop frame sensors have a natural zoom built in, so if you put a full frame lens on your crop frame camera, you are increasing your effective focal length of your camera artificially. This means you can get maximum detail at longer ranges, such as with nature, wildlife, and sports photography. For example, if you have a lens for a full frame sensor camera that is a 100mm lens, and you have a crop frame sensor with a 1.3 crop factor, you effectively have a 130mm lens. That same lens on another crop frame camera with a 1.6 crop factor acts, effectively, as a 160mm lens. What you sacrifice in a crop-frame sensor is both resolution, and, usually, low light level performance. This is due to the density of sensing points (known as pixels), among other things, resulting in the lower performance. As technology improves, and production costs decrease, we continue to see improvements in resolution, and even some full frame sensors appearing in lower priced regular consumer market cameras.
Posted on: Mon, 05 May 2014 17:19:15 +0000
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