Miracle

I hope someone gets benefit from this... so here goes.

If you have anything to add, feel free... just make sure your info is correct.

Often, if you are like me, you hear about crop factor, also known as focal length multiplier, all the time, and have (or had) no idea on what people were talking about.

See this?



It shows (graphically) a 35mm (wide, diagonally) camera film frame. It is what is exposed to light when the shutter on a film camera is tripped, recording the image, later to be developed.

Now, when we start talking about a crop factor, we are talking, essentially, about how much smaller a DIGITAL SLR cameras sensor is, in comparison to that 35mm film frame.

My Rebel XTi has a 1.6 crop factor sensor... which means it is 1.6 times smaller than a regular 35mm film frame.

Different bodies, different manufacturers, sometimes use different sensors. But the USUAL sensor, on consumer level DSLR's is an APS-C type sensor. My Rebel has an APS-C sensor, measuring 22.2x14.8mm, giving a 1.6 crop factor.

You may wonder, now that you know exactly WHAT a crop factor is, you may wonder, like I did, what exactly does it do?

Well... take this image for example:



That part of the photo within the borders of the film frame represents the photo you would get with a regular 35mm film camera.

All of the following would be taken with the same focal length camera... say a 35mm fixed lens, for demonstration purposes...

The green represents the picture you would get with a Canon 1.3x crop body.

The red represents the image you would get with an Old School Nikon DX camera.

And the blue is the image you would get with a Canon 1.6 crop body, like the Rebel XT and XTi.


When talking in ways of focal length multiplication, on a crop body, you can't get a TRUE focal length (as noted on the lens itself, or in the EXIF data), because the sensor sees less of the image on a Digital, cropped, SLR body. So in essence, a 50mm lens, on a 1.6 crop body, presents images at an equivalent of 80mm on a 35mm SLR. A 10mm wide angle on a 1.6 crop body presents images at the equivalent of 16mm on a film SLR.

But there are digital SLR cameras out there, ie. the Canon 5D, and 1D series, (I am not good with Nikon, so you guys help me out), that have what are known as Full Frame Sensors. Which means, simply, that the sensor in their bodies that record the image, are the same size as a typical 35mm film frame in film cameras.

Hope that helps...

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mySNsucks

i just learned something new good stuff

Baggy Spandex

For anyone who has used the crop tool in Photoshop before, you can see for yourself how cropping the image 'zooms' an image.

Open the crop tool and crop your image while it's at 100%. You'll see how cropping brings the image closer. This is essentially what the crop factor does to your lenses.

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