Define: Full Frame

I have been fascinated in the world of photgraphy being too technical and pricey yet once a picture is taken it can bring a story of its own.

Photography today has been made available to everyone where you can easily buy a camera, take a shot, and have it stored or printed. You can either opt for the film based or the digital based and have the point-and-shoot ones or the highly sophisticated ones, it is your choice as what people say, “tools are only as intelligent/ wise as the one who uses them.”

Many people today would prefer to have the digital cameras because of the ease in previewing the photo even right after the shot, can be printed or stored, readily editable, and very portable. However, film based cameras will still be in the market today because it still do provide a different feel for some photographers and more inmportantly the shots are not easily editable, it is very useful in crime scene shots or to show off you are good photographer because your shots are not edited. As for me, I want to have both as learning is a good experience.

The term “full frame” is one part of my learning experience in photogrphy. I have been searching for the definition of “full frame” camera and somehow I ended up with the 35 mm film, the standard size of the film in both still and motion pictures. Full frame simply refers to the usage of the the entire width and height of the film and the 35 mm film size became the standard size and was internationally recognised in 1909, since it bacame highly popular after its introduction in 1892 by William Dickson and Thomas Edison.

The standard size of a full frame film is 24 mm × 36 mm, so how does it apply to the digital cameras? Digital cameras have sensors to receive the light and record it as an image. The mixture of sensor size and pixel detail, the dots in the digital image, of the camera greatly affects the quality of the image where the closer the sensor size is to the full frame size the greater the detail in the image it provides per pixel output. Simply put the more pixel placed per sensor size the more quality in the image is lost. Putting it in practice, a 1/1.8″ sensor is 7.18 mm × 5.32 mm offers lesser detail at 12 megapixels resolution compared to a 24 mm × 36 mm sensor size of a Leica M9 or many full frame DSLRs at 12 megapixels.

However, there is a catch to the sensor size. The bigger your cameras’s sensor is, the more expensive it gets. Furthermore, in the compact camera world, the optical zoom and sensor size is inversely proportional because of the lens design limit. Meaning, the higher the optical zoom it provides the smaller the sensor size is!

So, if you plan on buying a camera, better opt for the one with the best value for your money. Know the technical details of the models you are choosing from especially when it comes to the compact digital cameras where many now offers high optical zoom sacrificing the size of the sensor. Still, the cheapest full frame camera is the film based considering you get all that in a simple point-and-shoot film camera and for Kodak it was named instamatic series.