I don't understand

I guess I was thinking it had to be something in terms of perspective and presence that was created with the larger sensor than just something technical like the way the sensor renders things.

parodying wrote in post #15656717
I still don't know why my photos seem more realistic though. I guess I'm asking more of a technical question. Does Full Frame mimic our eyes more than a cropped sensor? I can take two photos with 2 cameras of the same thing and I can tell the difference and which one makes me feel more like I'm actually in that moment when I look at it.

Mimic? Haha, how about blow them out of the water! An f/1.2 lens collects 4000x more light than our eyes, and plants it on a sensor that's significantly bigger than what's on the back of the gelatinous orbs in our head.

Our brains do however play an incredible part in the way we perceive things, applying tons of noise reduction, cloning, and sometimes straight-up making up the things we see from scratch. Our eyes play lots of tricks too, expanding the 7-stop dynamic range of our eyes to 20 stops, by constantly adjusting and blending the brightness and hue of what we see. And lets not get started on how well our auto white balance works.

That isn't even taking into account the fact that our eyes don't work as an image-taking device, but as a scanner, that constantly paints a composite of our view. Apples and oranges.

i think narrow DOF is part of the key, and that is narrower with larger formats.

certainly when i look at something rather close, i can tell in my peripheral vision that things in the BG are rather blurry.

I google Olympus E-P1. It is little sensor 12MP camera.
5Dc is FF sensor 12MP. The mystery was solved.

parodying wrote in post #15656868
I guess I was thinking it had to be something in terms of perspective and presence that was created with the larger sensor than just something technical like the way the sensor renders things.

As to "perspective", well, that's an interesting question that I haven't seen "hashed out" here, that is, is there a "meaningful" difference between a full-frame shot taken at, say, 50mm and a "crop" shot taken with about 30mm? Hmm, I don't know, but I'm not an "image scientist" and can't answer to that. Are you saying that you see a "perspective" difference between the two shots taken from the same position and identically framed using the "equivalent" focal lengths?

As to "presence", well, what do you mean here? Are you talking about the "Image Quality" issues that we've talked about or something different?