Oh, and that lens will also be cheaper and smaller because it’s for an APS-C camera. To get that same equivalent focal length on an APS-C camera you only need a 200mm lens because the crop factor will multiply it. This was a disadvantage to APS-C cameras in the previous section, and it’s an advantage here.Ī 300mm lens for a full-frame camera is going to be large and expensive. This generally means that they will be cheaper too, barring some other kind of super-fancy technology found on the camera. So it should go without saying that the smaller one is cheaper to produce (given it has the same technology).Īnd as we just saw, the camera bodies and lenses can be smaller. The sensor is one of the most expensive things in a camera. Because the image area is smaller, the overall lens can be smaller, requiring less glass.Īll of this will cut down on the weight of the camera and lens. Thus, they can be made smaller and lighter.ĪPS-C sensors can also take smaller lenses. The camera also doesn’t need to be as robust to hold those large lenses required for full-frame cameras. That smaller sensor doesn’t need as large of a camera body to fit in. From Īdvantages of APS-C vs Full-Frame Smaller cameras & lenses It’s wide, but not the super-wide view you bought the lens for.Ī full-frame body (left) next to two APS-C bodies. Put that lens on an APS-C camera and now you have a perspective equal to a 24mm lens. Now think about this in regards to that 16mm super-wide lens you bought for those amazing skyscapes. However, the physical focal length is still 50mm. So that 50mm lens will give you an apparent focal length of roughly 75mm on an APS-C camera. There’s no conversion involved.Īn APS-C camera crops the image by, normally, 1.5x. Accurate fields of view & wide lensesĪ 50mm lens on a full-frame camera has a field of view of what you’d expect for a 50mm lens. You can still get an incredibly shallow depth of field with an APS-C camera, it just takes a different lens. You’ll get a shallower depth of field – or background blur – out of the full-frame camera.īut it’s apples and oranges by this point. Yes, the same 50mm f/1.8 lens will have a different hyperfocal distance between a full-frame camera and an APS-C camera. I didn’t even want to bring this up because it can get messy with all the math. It’s not about the size of the sensor, it’s about the size of the pixel and the technology associated with it. There are some APS-C cameras, however, that have a higher dynamic range than their full-frame counterparts due to technological advances. This is why most full-frame cameras have a higher dynamic range than APS-C sensors – the pixels are usually larger, thus they can give you a larger tonal range. If you have a given pixel count, those pixels will be able to gather more light on a full-frame sensor than they would be able to on an APS-C sensor. That means that they can collect more water – or in this case, light. If you put 24 million buckets on a full-frame sensor then they can be physically larger than the 24 million buckets on an APS-C sensor. Think of these pixels as buckets, that’s a common analogy. What happens when you take the 24 million pixels on a full-frame sensor and cram them onto an APS-C sensor? You have to shrink the pixels to fit them in this smaller space. So we’ve established that full-frame sensors are physically larger than APS-C sensors. Wikimedia commons.Īdvantages of Full Frame vs APS-C Better light sensitivity & dynamic range They generally have more capability, but does that matter to what you do? I’ll answer the question now: No, full-frame sensors are not “better” than APS-C sensors. He was one of the first to field test the X-T2, a 24MP APS-C mirrorless camera, after regularly using the 16MP X-T1. He’s a Fujifilm X-Photographer, one of the elite brand ambassadors for Fujifilm. ![]() This dude has had a few National Geographic covers. I made these sales based on the image, not the sensor. I wasn’t printing giant wall murals. I would print a 12″x18″ every now and then but I was mostly selling stock photos for magazines & digital publications.Ī number of these were made with the APS-C Sony a6000 & a6300 because I liked traveling with those smaller cameras. ![]() And I saw that my long-held beliefs about full-frame vs. In my “choosing a travel camera” article I touched a little bit on how my “needs versus wants” changed over the course of my career. Therefore I only looked at cameras with full-frame sensors. I didn’t really know the differences between full-frame sensors and APS-C sensors, I just knew that pros used full-frame and that’s all I cared about because that’s what I was told by people selling cameras. Pros use full-frame sensors and nothing else. Ten years ago I would have scoffed at APS-C sensors. I earn a small commission of product sales to keep this website going. Disclosure: This post may contain affiliate links.
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