Understanding the Heart of Your Camera System: The Camera Body (Camera Lesson 06)

Introduction

In this video I’m going to cover the single most crucial part of your camera system: the camera body. In fact I consider it the heart of your camera system. After watching this video you’ll be able to make smarter choices about choosing a camera system that is appropriate for your particular project.

Sensor

The most important part of the camera body is its sensor. It is this one part that shapes the quality of everything else. The maximum resolution of your sensor determines the maximum amount of detail that your camera can record. The ideal situation is that you get a camera that over-samples the image. It should do that through either recording at a resolution that is greater than what you are delivering at, or by having a higher resolution sensor and then down-sampling that sensor to the resolution you are delivering at.

The size of the sensor is also another important consideration when it comes to choosing a camera body. The sensor size determines how much of a lenses image circle it sees. The image circle is the size of the circle that gets projects by a lens. Different lens formats project different size image circles, which are designed around the size of the cameras sensor. And the size of the sensor also determines it’s crop factor.

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