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Comment by steveridout | Hacker News Reader

Is it possible that a high quality camera with a small sensor could actually be preferable to a full frame camera like a 5D in this particular case? My thinking is that it might be hard to get more than a sliver of the image in focus with a full frame camera. Does anyone with more experience know if this is true?

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He does mention that, yeah:

> The smaller the focal length of the external lens and bigger - of built-in camera's optics, the greater magnification is achieved, but less depth of field is obtained. Compact camera, with a sensor of small physical size, have an advantage over DSLRs in the depth of field and mobility, allowing you to take pictures quickly and easily change the location and shooting angle. But small sensor have much higher noise level.

The sensor size doesn't change anything. A camera with a larger sensor would have the same image projected on the sensor but it would also capture more around it - basically, you could get the same image by cropping that part out of the larger image.

However, a larger sensor probably would have larger pixels, which would help with lighting and noise reduction.

Focus bracketing could easily solve that problem. In fact, Magic Lantern (the equivalent of CHDK for the larger Canon DSLRs) has a mode to do automated focus bracketing with the electronic focus controls.

I don't really know about focus difficulty, but I calculated the 35mm equivalent of the PowerShot A650 at 6x and it's 200mm. That long of a lens could be pretty awkward to work with, for a start (I still want to try it, my APS-C camera would need only a 140mm lens to get the same zoom, besides the external optics of course).

I used to use a 200mm lens with a reversed 50mm on a Nikon D70, and the focus is difficult. It sounds like the photographer here is using a sort of "spray and pray" technique and using focus-stacking software later.

You actually don't need the telephoto, though. You can get a reversing ring that mounts a prime lens directly to the camera. I took this using a 50mm lens on a full frame body, no focus stacking: https://c1.staticflickr.com/1/498/19387253482_cfdb183b3a_c.j...

If you use a shorter focal length lens, you'll get a higher magnification. I've used a 28mm in the past but wasn't very happy with the image quality.

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