What is full frame?

I know this is a dumb question to most of you, but what is full frame referring to? And what are the advantages?

The sensor is the same size as a frame on a roll of 35mm film. Most digital cameras have sensors smaller than that, sometimes a lot smaller. In general, larger sensors have better dynamic range, lower noise, and narrower DOF than smaller sensors of the same technology generation.

No dumb questions here. It's the size of the image sensor, full frame is 36×24 mm which is the same as a 35mm film frame.

Advantages;
Greater dynamic range
Better high ISO performance
Shallower depth of field

Disadvantages;
Lower high speed frame rate
Cost

How can someone who has 204 posts and been here for almost 5 years not know what full frame is? There is a new thread every day on the topic.

Jumpcut wrote in post #13061615
How can someone who has 204 posts and been here for almost 5 years not know what full frame is? There is a new thread every day on the topic.

Maybe the OP has been making use of other parts of the forum that don't discuss DSLR's, or possibly didn't have any interest in Full Frame until recently. Heck, I didn't give a rats ass about full frame until two weeks ago myself Be nice everbody.

OP, I apologize for the Google thing,...people do it to me all the time, and I just find it funny is all...absolutely no offense to you my friend. Plenty of smart folks here to answer your question, I'm just not one of them. I'm to lazy so I like to post links.

When camera manufacturers started designing digital SLRs (DSLRs), they decided that the DSLR bodies should be about the same physical size and configuration as their 35 mm film SLRs. The early DSLRs were made with sensors that were significantly smaller than the film frame in 35 mm film SLRs (which was 36 mm wide by 24 mm tall). The format (size of the sensors) of the early DSLRs is the same "APS-C" format that's used today for most of Canon's DSLRs. The 35 mm film format was dubbed as "full-frame" when digital cameras were made with 36 mm by 24 mm sensors.

Why is 35mm the standard and nothing larger than that ?

chiggah wrote in post #13061875
Why is 35mm the standard and nothing larger than that ?

Cost. You can buy digital cameras with sensors the size of what was called "medium format" in film, but they are quite expensive. The sensor is probably the most expensive part of a DSLR, and the larger they are, the more expensive they are.

That, and 35mm was the most popular (by far) film format.

chiggah wrote in post #13061875
Why is 35mm the standard and nothing larger than that ?

There is.

Medium format, large format.

The reason why they are the standard is because anything else bigger is TONS more expensive.

Actually crop sensors, 1.6x, is probably the standard.

chiggah wrote in post #13061875
Why is 35mm the standard and nothing larger than that ?

There are various sizes, for years I shot 2 1/4 x 2 1/4 film.

windpig wrote in post #13061515
Advantages;
Greater dynamic range

I'm not convinced of this. If I'm not mistaken, dynamic range is the result of the signal to noise ratio of the sensor at base ISO. That isn't a function of sensor area, it's a function of well size per area and the read noise per area, which is a function of the sensor construction itself, not the sensor size.

Yes, larger sensor cameras seem to yield higher dynamic range, sometimes, but that could well be because they're simply more expensive and, therefore, the engineers have managed to eke out more dynamic range from them.

For instance, the Nikon D7000 has 13.9 Ev of dynamic range from a 15.6 x 23.6 sensor. The D3x has 13.7 Ev from a 24.0 x 35.9 sensor. And the Phase One P65Plus has 13 Ev from a 40.4 x 53.9 sensor.

The Phase One should be blowing everything else out of the water. It was announced July 2008, while the D3x was announced December 2008, only 6 months later. The D7000 was announced September 2010, quite a lot later, so we can chalk up its performance to technological advancement.

The Phase One has a sensor that is 2.5 times the area of that of the D3x. That should give it a 1 1/3 stop advantage right out of the gate. And yet, despite that, it does worse than the D3x, by nearly 3/4 a stop!


Want another example? The Canon 5Dmk2 yields 11.9 Ev of dynamic range, while the 50D yields 11.3 Ev. That's only a 0.6 Ev difference, when the sensor size difference should yield more than a 1.3 Ev difference. These two cameras were announced less than a month apart from each other and are from the same manufacturer, so they have basically the same sensor tech.


Indeed, in the ever-present 7D versus 5Dmk2 comparison, the 7D yields very little dynamic range advantage to the 5Dmk2: only 0.2 Ev (the 7D has 11.7 Ev of dynamic range).


So does full frame really have a dynamic range advantage? If it does, it certainly isn't obvious from the measurements. Then again, the 1Dmk4 has a 0.3 Ev dynamic range advantage over the 7D, exactly what the sensor size difference suggests it should. Go figure.

Generally yes, because of the additional light gathering capability in the frame. However, note that for this, too, you have to use the shallower depth of field capability of the sensor.

Yep.

No. That's not a function of the sensor size, at least for the sensor sizes we're talking about. Canon is perfectly capable of building a 10 FPS full frame camera if it wants to. It has in the past (the EOS 3 is capable of doing 10 FPS with the high-speed film drive grip).

Nikon is already building 9 FPS full frame cameras.

No question about this. Smaller sensors have better yields and are less expensive to construct.

Eng27DCFD wrote in post #13061479
I know this is a dumb question to most of you, but what is full frame referring to? And what are the advantages?

chiggah wrote in post #13061875
Why is 35mm the standard and nothing larger than that ?

Actually all these terms are relative. in the "big picture" of photography they are meaningless, because over the decades there have been many fil formats -- in fact, our "standard" print sizes go back a long ways and in no way reflect something historically considered "full frame".

So, to try to nail things down:

A few decades ago photographers began to settle into the 35mm film format because it was smaller, less expensive and more convenient than the middle format and large format films and cameras that had been used for the previous decades.

And so the popularity of these formats greaw and eventually diminated the bulk of photography and photographic gear, although many "serious" photographers continued to shoot in the larger formats because of the superior quality images the larger films were able to capture --always a consideration.

But over time the 35mm format dominated, as more and more professionals adopted it and medium- and large-format shooting became a specialized niche.

As this happened big camera companies like Nikon and Canona built up comprehensive systems around that format, and out of that effort the SLR cameras (single lens reflex) became popular -- you had an optical path that came through the lens and was reflected into your viewfinder and also was avilable to expose the film when you triggered the shutter. This feature was combined with the ability to exchange lenses using a common lens mount. And all of this was designed around the size of the 35mm film, both the camera "innards", the lens mount, and the building system of lenses were designed to accomodate the 35mm format.

So, for instance, the Canon EOS advanced system for electronic control and communication between a Canon camera and an EF lens all were incorporated into the Canon 35mm SLR system -- in fact it was either this move or one in there somewhere that necessitated Canon changing the design of their lens mount, making older lenses incompatible, which caused a lot of grumbling, but since then things have been on an even footing, meaning that the path through the mount is still made to accomodate the "standard" 35mm film size. Bigger film would certainly not work. If you found a way to run smaller film through, well, the best you would get is, well, a smaller image then that which the system was designed to deliver.

In fact, for a brief time, film companies did put out the smaller APS-C film. It lasted a bit, but never really took...

Then the digital revolution broke.

I can't give a breakdown on how things developed in the DSLR world -- in a short span of time, Canon adopted a Kodak back with a smaller sensor then, in 2000 came out with the first APS-C-equipped full-fledge DSLR, the D30. The "innards" had to be redsigned to fit the smaller sensor but again, it had to adapt to the system that was designed around the 35mm sensor.

And then, in '01, Canon put out the 1D (mkI), which was a step bigger than the D30. And then, in '02, Canon Came out with the APS-C D60, but also the 1Ds, which was sized the same as a 35mm film frame.

Now it seemed like confusion reigned, and continued throughout the coming years. In fact. the camera that I remember turning much of professional photography on its ears was the APS-C 10D, which finally delivered results that many pros considered as good as what they were getting from their 35mm film kits, and that was significant.

But the fact is, it was recognized that these systems, whether they be the APS-C cameras like the D30/D60/10D or the APS-H 1D bodies, they were still built around the "35mm system" of lenses and mounts and, in fact as the basis of the whole SLR path of development. And so, in the DSLR world, the 35mm format forms the "framework" of things, so relative to that world it is the "standard".

In recent years there have been significant developments to accomodate the APS-C "crop" format -- since the 30D not just have the bodies been redesigned but EF-S lenses have been designed with specially-modified mounts that APS-C cameras have redesigned mounts for, all to accomodate smaller lenses that deliver the field of vew for the focal length that a "normal" EF lenses would deliver at the same focal length.

But, during this timespan, Canon came out with the 1Ds Mk II and then the ground-breaking 5d, which introduced a less-expensive body, using the smaller "prosumer" design, and in doing so introduced a broader field of photographers to the idea of shooting with the full 35mm frame for which the SLR system was designed. Canon wasn't the first camera company to come out with the 35mm-sized digital sensor, but you could say it "created the market" for one since it fit into the populare EOS system.

Nikon, by the way, was running a few steps behind Canon in all this, but that's another story.

So as to why the 35mm format is the "standard" I hope I've ansered that -- in terms of our SLR system it certainly is, but I'll repeat that it is relative. Even today, photogs are shooting with digital medium format bodies, and they are, well, the envy of many DSLR shooters today.

Now something interesting popped up in my bit of research of all this -- the term "full frame" has a history that goes back to the film days, and it was about a 35mm film frame compared to a "sliced" frame of 18x24mm film. Here's a brief Wikipedia blurb on it:

In 35 mm (135 film) cameras, the terms full-frame and half-frame were used to distinguish the 24 × 36 mm and 18 × 24 mm film formats;[10] the half-frame 35 mm film format is also known as single-frame in movie film, and as a result, full-frame film cameras were sometimes known as double-frame.[11]

So, you can't "blame" the term "full frame" on DSLR stuff, it goes back to when 35mm film was the standard movie film size and compared to smaller film was called "full frame". And 35mm still film was actually "taken" from movie film, so the idea went along: when 35mm film became the "standard" for our SLR and then DSLR systems, the name tag went along with it!

I'm done!

Nice post Tony, although a couple of points for complete accuracy. The first Canon camera that used the EF-s mount was the 300D aka original Rebel. The first of the xx line to have it was the 20D.
The other bit that I found difficult to follow was your attempt to explain the smaller image circle of crop only lenses and the effect that has on field of view, but that is difficult to put simply for all to understand as the numerous threads we see here on POTN shows.

Alan

BigAl007 wrote in post #13062934
Nice post Tony, although a couple of points for complete accuracy. The first Canon camera that used the EF-s mount was the 300D aka original Rebel. The first of the xx line to have it was the 20D.
The other bit that I found difficult to follow was your attempt to explain the smaller image circle of crop only lenses and the effect that has on field of view, but that is difficult to put simply for all to understand as the numerous threads we see here on POTN shows.

Alan

Ah, well, Al ,thanks for clarifying things! Lke I said, I don't have all the details down, but I hope I did an OK job of "painting the big picture"!