A large sensor helps you predict picture quality right out of the box without having to take a guess. In a standard digital camera, the lens is like a large solar panel which gathers the light from the scene to produce an image. A bigger camera lens will therefore gather more light, thus producing a better picture. As a general rule, a 20-megapixel camera with a six inch lens on a full-frame camera body will deliver the best picture.
Sensor size also affects your ability to take zoomed-in pictures or similar high magnification images with a camera with a lower optical zoom. It should be noted that crop factor, which controls how far objects are cropped, can have a bearing on image resolution. Most of today’s small digital cameras come with a crop factor of one. However, some crop factors are as low as 0.5%, which may result in blurry images when you need to zoom in on close-ups.
The size of a camera affects the amount of light the sensor can capture and focus. In a traditional film camera, a large lens and a long shutter speed is required to capture photos of moving objects. This requires a long distance between the lens and the film plane, making a rather long exposure time necessary. Traditional machine-vision lenses also have a long minimum focus distance, which also makes for long exposures. Crop factor, machine vision lenses and film SLRs all work best when they are used with smaller, faster machines such as pinhole cameras. However, they can still be used on SLRs for high-speed imaging.
Lenses will only work as well as their viewing distance and lighting conditions. This means that wide angle lenses may not capture enough light for a good image. If there is no natural light available to the imaging system, then the camera may switch to an automatic focus mode, where it will use the cameras mirror image to illuminate the image. This produces better images but also consumes more battery power.
The size of a camera sensor has a lot to do with image quality. The further away from the optical focus the camera is, the fainter the image will be at the edges. Also, higher pixels will produce sharper images. However, this may cause blurring of the images. Therefore, if you are going to take pictures using a fast shutter speed and want to enjoy great image quality, then make sure that the camera has a large pixels and a long minimum focusing distance.
Modern lenses are designed to focus on details of a scene. However, they are less precise in terms of sharpness at the edges. The image quality may suffer with long lenses because of the micro distortion that is caused by the lens’ designs. But, if you need a fast shutter speed and want to enjoy the benefits of modern lenses, then the best option is to opt for a camera lens with a long minimum focusing distance and large pixels.