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Depth of Field in the Digital World
Just want to start with some background first. I've been doing a lot of macro lens work&nbsp;over a few months&nbsp;getting high speed video&nbsp;footage as well as DSLR video and stills for lower speed sample&nbsp;testing at work. Have spent many hours reviewing and editing all of the images. In the process I thought that I noticed a correlation between the number of pixels on the various&nbsp;sensors and the depth of what seemed to be in focus. <br><br>Had a day at home over the weekend that was too windy, cold and rainy to want to be outside taking pictures so I decided it was time to put this observation to a more controlled test to see what would happen. I set up a macro lens with a collar on a tripod and pointed it at a ruler that was held&nbsp;on edge&nbsp;by a clamp. The ruler was set at an angle to allow using the graduations to measure&nbsp;the depth of what seemed to be in focus. I then took shots with three different bodies all&nbsp;manually focused as well as I could&nbsp;using 10x liveview on the same graduation mark of the ruler. The pictures were all taken with the exact same picture style&nbsp;settings, ISO, white balance and everything else that could be set to the same settings. They were imported using the same&nbsp;DPP settings with no sharpness or noise reduction applied. They were batch processed to 8x10 JPEGs so that all would be treated the same while being brought to a specific physical size. On reviewing the results, there was a progression in the apparent depth of field that matched up with the sensor resolution.<br><br>On further reflection this is making sense to me. With film, the&nbsp;physical properties would remain reasonably&nbsp;constant for one brand. Change the format size and you change the magnification factor&nbsp;required to enlarge it to an 8x10 print. With digital sensors the resolution changes with the number of pixels. The image capture and processing is different as well. We create a file of an image in our computers that is defined by pixels instead of millimeters. The only time that the file becomes defined by a physical dimension is when it is printed, or converted to a specific size in processing.<br><br>The reason I am posting this is that only two of my three bodies use the same physical size of sensor and I am hoping that someone who reads this will have three bodies of different resolution&nbsp;that use&nbsp;the same size&nbsp;sensor. Combined with curiousity&nbsp;and a willingness to repeat a similar setup of course. I am just wanting to remove the extra variable of sensor size from the&nbsp;test at this point. At this point, I don't wish to post pictures. The results are strongly&nbsp;suggestive with the two bodies, but not conclusive due to the sensor size change for the third.<br><br>Thanks,<br>Jeff
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