From the course: What Video Camera Should I Buy?

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Lenses and focal lengths

Lenses and focal lengths

From the course: What Video Camera Should I Buy?

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Lenses and focal lengths

- Now that we talked about sensors, let's talk about what goes in front of them: the lens. Lenses gather light and focus the image on the camera's sensor. Lenses come in different focal lengths. A focal length is the field of view that a lens can capture and focus on the sensor. A standard focal length is 50 millimeters. A lens that only has one focal length is called a prime lens. These lenses tend to be sharper and allow more light to pass through. Next, we have zoom lenses. A zoom lens has several focal lengths in one lens. Very handy. But also, expensive. A popular zoom lens is a 24 to 70 millimeter, and 70 to 200 millimeter. With these lenses, you can zoom the entire range to capture wide landscapes, or get in close to a subject that's far away. A nice advantage of smaller sensors is the cameras and lenses can be a lot smaller as well. The reason is that the lenses are designed to cover a much smaller sensor. This makes them lighter, smaller, and cheaper. For example, here's a…

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