The Digital Sensor: A Guide to Understanding Digital Cameras

Field of View

Now that you have some basic understanding of digital camera sensors, it is time to take a closer look at the practical considerations that are created by these differences in sensors. A very poorly understood concept is the lens multiplier with the smaller than 35mm sensor-size that is used in most digital SLR cameras. The best way to illustrate this is with actual photos taken by a range of digital SLR cameras from the same tripod location.

We shot the same view using the exact same tripod location on a range of current digital SLR cameras. Each camera used a lens with the same focal length of 50mm. Lighting was the same with a 100W high-right light source, camera aperture was f4.0 in all cases, and white balance was set to Tungsten. The purpose of this series is to illustrate what you can see with each camera with the same lens, so exposure data is somewhat irrelevant, but exposure conditions were kept as constant as possible for reference.

The Canon EOS 5D is a full-frame SLR, which means the sensor is the same size as 35mm film. This point of view is the way an image at this distance would look on the Nikon D3, Canon 1Ds III, Canon 5D, and 35mm film cameras. The APS-H sensor used in a few Canon pro models is 1.3X and falls between full frame and 1.5X in its field of view.