What’s the difference between focal length, zoom, and magnification?
Asked 9/11/2014
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I’m confused about the terms focal length, zoom, and magnification. I thought a higher focal length simply meant more zoom. But I’ve seen comments saying some 70-200mm lenses don’t behave exactly the same at the long end, and that a Tamron 70-200mm can act more like a shorter focal length at minimum focus distance. If two lenses are both labeled 70-200mm, are they really the same focal length? How can one seem to “zoom less” than the other?
Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
Photography Stack Exchange contributor
11y ago
2 Answers
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The technical terms and colloquial usage are a bit different here:
- Focal length is a technical characteristic of a lens that directly influences its angle of view, i.e. how much of the entire field of view it will project onto the sensor. Large focal length results in a small angle of view, which means the image contains less, but it's shown larger.
- Magnification is the ratio between an object's real size and the size at which a lens can project it onto the sensor. This is a function of focal length and the closest distance at which the lens can focus. Most lenses have a magnification of 0.3 or smaller: i.e., they cannot show objects at more than 30% of their real size on the sensor. Macro lenses are defined as having a magnification of 1 or larger, which they achieve by being able to focus more closely than regular lenses.
- Zoom is the ratio between the smallest and largest focal lengths in a lens where it's variable. It's often interpreted as "how much larger than the naked eye can the lens show something," but that is only true if the lower end of the focal length range is equivalent to the angle of view that the naked eye has, which is equivalent to what a full frame camera shows with a 50mm lens. There are wide angle zooms that show things "smaller" than the naked eye even at the upper end of their 2x zoom range. So the zoom factor by itself is meaningless without knowing where it starts.
- Crop factor is the ratio of the sensor's size to a full frame sensor that has the "standard" 35mm size. This is important because a smaller sensor shows a smaller part of the image the lens projects, which has the same effect in many ways as using a larger focal length. A common sensor size is APS-C, which is 1.5 times smaller than full frame, which means that a 50mm lens on an APS-C sensor will result in the same angle of view as a 75mm lens on a full frame sensor. Which is why focal lengths are not directly comparable between cameras and you'll often hear people talk about "35mm-equivalent focal length" when computing angles of view. It's also the reason why compact cameras can be so compact: they have much smaller sensors, which means that for the same angle of view they can use a lens with a much smaller focal length, which means the lens itself can be much smaller (and is cheaper to make).
Originally by user25699. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
user25699
11y ago
0
Generated from our catalog & community — verify before relying on it.
They’re related, but not the same thing.
Focal length is a technical property of the lens. In general, longer focal lengths give a narrower angle of view and make distant subjects appear larger.
Zoom usually means a lens can change focal length. A 70-200mm lens is a zoom lens because it covers a range of focal lengths. A 300mm prime is not a zoom, even though it gives a strong telephoto view.
Magnification is how large a subject is projected onto the sensor, and it depends on both focal length and how closely the lens can focus.
For the specific 70-200 example: both lenses are genuinely sold as 70-200mm lenses. But some modern lenses change their effective focal length when focused very close. So a lens may behave like less than 200mm at minimum focus distance, while still being close to 200mm at normal distances. That’s why a review might say a lens is “more like 160mm” or “170mm” at close focus.
So Tamron is not secretly selling a mislabeled lens; the difference is due to close-focus behavior, not the stated zoom range in normal use.
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AI11y ago
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