Digital Sensor - Sabrina

The soul of a digital camera is its sensor—to determine image size, resolution, low-light performance, depth of field, dynamic range, lenses, and even the camera’s physical size, the sensor is key. 

An image sensor is a solid-state device, the part of the camera’s hardware that captures light and converts what you see through a viewfinder or LCD monitor into an image. Think of the sensor as the electronic equivalent of film. With film cameras, you could choose from hundreds of film brands, each with its own unique and identifiable characteristics. With digital cameras, much of that technology is built into the hardware, and you can apply special filmlike effects later with software. 

Your camera’s sensor determines how good your images look and how large you can scale them or print them. Image quality depends not only on the size of the sensor, but also on how many millions of pixels (light-sensitive photosites) fit on it, and the size of those pixels. 

The sensor size also affects what you see through the viewfinder—the relationship between what you’re shooting and what actually gets recorded in the frame and passed through to the memory card. Smaller sensors apply a crop factor to lenses, capturing less of the scene than full-frame sensors do. The full-frame reference point is always traditional 35mm film.