Brief Scenes

A digital camera has a 1.6 multiplier effect due to a smaller field area than a 35mm camera.?

What I need to know is if a 100mm lense used with a 35mm camera then has an effective focal length of 160mm, does it really have more power to magnify than the lense number itself, or does the smaller image area on the digital sensor just have less coverage and it appears larger. I don’t understand how the power increases just because the sensor area is smaller. Please explain.

The link to the dpreview site is a pretty good explanation. A better term than “multiplier factor” is crop factor, because that is essentially what is happening. You’re not increasing the magnification, you are “cropping” the image/field of view.

It’s similar in principle as when you have let’s say a 4×6 picture of a person and you crop just their head and make a 4×6 of that. Since the sensor is smaller, it is essentially a “crop” of a full 35mm frame.

So, while this is nice because it makes your telephoto lenses even longer, it also has the converse effect of making it difficult to get a good wide angle shot. This is why there are special lenses that are extremely wide (Canon’s 10-22mm EF-S for example) to try and address this “issue”.

Seminar: Image Sensors for Digital Cameras