Originally Posted by
arthurking83
As long as you realise what the difference is then all is good.
Cropping is not equal to greater magnification!
for example of how this can be important.
Say you captured an image of this ant. Lets also say that you displayed this image somewhere, and someone stumbles across it and finds that it's not one that is known of.
ie. you have captured an image of a new discovery.
But the person that discovered this new find contacts you asking if you could send them an image, and wanted some camera info too.
You tell them it's a crop sensor Canon and 24mm lens .. etc, etc .. but somehow in the excitement of a new discovery the fact that the image is a cropped one of the full frame has been overlooked.
If the ant actually covered only 1/10th of the original image, and you cropped it to show it as filling half the frame height instead, then magnification(in a scientific sense) goes haywire.
in a simplistic sense:
in your original image, if the sensor height is 16mm and the ant is 1/1oth of that on the original, then the ant's actual size is 1.6mm
But if you send the scientist a cropped version of this image only, without any notification of this, and the ant in this image is shown as 1/2 the sensor height, then the scientist will assume that the ant's physical size is 8mm.
They may subsequently head out on a field trip looking for the wrong sized species!
All of this is super simplistic to say the least, but it's simply for the purpose of trying to physically imagine what 'magnification' actually means!
If you want this type of 'magnification' then you don't want to change sensor size for your next camera .. your priority would be more pixels from the next camera.