From the course: Learning to Use Mirrorless Cameras

Understanding sensor size

From the course: Learning to Use Mirrorless Cameras

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Understanding sensor size

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- One concern you'll frequently hear people talk about with mirrorless cameras, is sensor size. Many mirrorless cameras use a smaller sensor, and people are often concerned that the small sensor means that there's automatically going to be a lot of noise. Keep in mind physics are physics, so smaller sensors have less sensitivity to light because there are less photoreceptors. This means that the sensor size can impact the camera sensitivity to light. But the camera sensor is really only one part of the exposure. Remember, when shooting with a camera, you do have options here. You can adjust the ISO or the sensitivity of the sensor, but other factors like the aperture of the lens, and shutter speed will affect how much light comes in. By balancing out all three parts when you make an exposure, you'll get great images. Now I find that when I'm shooting on a mirrorless camera and I have a reasonable amount of light, they perform really well. Cameras like the Olympus or Panasonic with the smaller Micro Four Thirds sensor, well, these are smaller than a traditional DSLR sensor, even a crop sensor. So you can't ratchet them up to 25000 ISO and expect to get a great shot. The smaller sensors will produce more noise. But if we slightly lower the shutter speed and shoot from a tripod, or we just use a higher quality lens, you'll rarely notice this. I've done all sorts of time lapse photography and even night mode photography using a camera like this, and I love it because it's lightweight. I could backpack in with three of these and then set them up for an evening nighttime shoot, to capture great night sky photography in DSLR. Great battery life and it works quite well. Now if you do need full frame sensors, that tends to be an option as well. Manufacturers like Nikon, Canon, and Sony, all have this as an available choice, the ability to capture full frame with a mirrorless camera. This will give you the benefit of the larger sensor, which typically includes more sensitivity and better light sensitivity for capturing noise free images. This works quite well, but it does come with a slight cost. When shooting with the full frame camera, you'll need to use a lens that is rated for a full frame sensor and can adequately cover the sensor with enough image data. Most lenses can do this, but a lot of the lower cost or cheaper kit lenses may not be rated for full frame sensors. Now other things here to keep in mind is that it's not just the sensor itself. These days when you're processing RAW photos or even the in-camera software, it is so easy to remove noise. Additionally, even if there is noise in the image, it's so easy to clean this up. All of these cameras have in-camera noise reduction and software like Lightroom, Adobe Camera Raw, Luminar, Capture One, and others all do a great job of easily removing noise from your images during post-production. That's not to say that a mirrorless camera is automatically noisier than a DSLR, it really just comes down to sensor size. Just like there are DSLRs with smaller sensors, there are mirrorless cameras with smaller sensors. And it is possible to get full frame sensors in both a DSLR or a mirrorless variety. Just remember as you're choosing your camera and which model you get, if shooting in low light conditions or having maximum control over the camera to shoot with faster shutter speeds is essential to your shooting style. You may want to make the financial investment in the full frame camera.

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