Crop Factor: If you own a digital SLR camera, you may have heard of crop factor, or focal length multiplier. Basically, crop factor determines how telephoto or wide angle your lenses appears to be when they're mounted to a digital SLR camera, as opposed to a traditional 35mm film camera. That's because the image sensor on most dSLRs is smaller than a full frame of 35mm film, and when you look through the viewfinder of a DSLR camera you see what your image sensor sees. To find the effective focal length of a lens mounted to an SLR, you multiply its actual focal length by your cam's crop factor. For example, a 70-300mm lens, x 1.5 crop factor, will seem like a 105-450mm lens on your DSLR. Most digital SLRs have a crop factor of 1.5 or 1.6, but different camera brands and models have different-sized sensors, and that will affect each camera's exact crop factor. Full-frame digital SLRs use image sensors that are the same size as a frame of 35mm film, and therefore have no crop factor.

 

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