Why would you use a 0.007mm circle of confusion on a Canon 5D Mark II?
Asked 6/1/2013
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The Canon 5D Mark II has a pixel pitch of about 0.00645mm, and I’ve seen some people suggest using roughly 0.007mm as the circle of confusion (CoC) for depth-of-field calculations. But Canon has used around 0.035mm for DOF charts, a common full-frame value is about 0.03–0.033mm, and Zeiss uses sensor diagonal divided by 1730, which is about 0.025mm for full frame.
I understand that acceptable CoC depends on display size, magnification, viewing distance, and visual acuity. So why would someone choose a CoC close to the camera’s pixel size? Is that tied to a specific print size or to viewing the image at 100% on a monitor? Also, when people say that an 8x10 print from a 5D Mark II is about 8.5x magnification and 100% screen viewing is around 45x magnification, how are those figures derived?
Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
Photography Stack Exchange contributor
13y ago
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Most depth of field (DoF) calculations are based on the assumption that the image will be viewed as an 8X10 print at a viewing distance of about 10 inches (25cm) by a person with 20/20 vision. For a 35mm film sized image, that means about an 8X magnification factor. For a blur circle to be perceived as a point at that display size and viewing distance, it must be about .03mm or smaller on the unmagnified virtual image projected by the lens onto the recording medium (the film negative or the digital sensor). Zeiss assumed that some people viewing the photo would have better than 20/20 vision and allowed for that in their calculations to arrive at .025mm. In either case, the allowable CoC for viewing an 8X10 print at 10 inches is several pixel widths wide. In the case of the Canon 5D mark II, both .03 and .025 are between 4 and 5 pixels wide.
If you are pixel peeping at 100%, then you are viewing the image at a much greater magnification than the 8X10 standard. You are viewing it at around 45X magnification, so areas of the image that appear sharp at 8X magnification are revealed to be slightly blurry at 45X magnification. In this case, you would need to use the pixel pitch of the sensor for your circle of confusion when computing what the DoF would be for that viewing condition.
With digital sensors, the size of the pixel determines the size at which the circle of confusion (CoC) becomes significant when viewing at 100% crops. Any blur circle smaller than the pixel pitch will be recorded as a single pixel. Only when the blur circle becomes larger than an individual pixel will it be recorded by two adjacent pixels.
The other thing to consider is that each pixel on your sensor is filtered for Red, Green, or Blue. To produce a color image either your camera's jpeg engine or your RAW conversion software applies a demosaicing algorithm to produce a separate R, G, & B value for each pixel using complex mathematical interpolation. This demosaiced image can then be sharpened by software that uses contrast between adjacent pixels to try and reclaim some of that lost resolution. That is why .007mm is probably close enough to the .00639 pixel pitch of the 5DII's sensor to use in calculating the DoF when viewing at 100%.
Here is another way to look at it. If you have a monitor with a resolution of 1920x1080 and you display an uncropped image from your 5D II on it, each pixel of you monitor is combining between 3 and 4 pixels worth of data from your camera into each pixel. Any part of the original image that is blurred by less than 3 pixels will appear just as sharp on your computer monitor as the sharpest part of the picture. But when you magnify the picture to 100% and only look at part of the image filling your entire screen, you will be able to see any blur that is greater than 1 pixel wide (assuming your vision is good enough and you are close enough to see individual pixels).
Originally by user15871. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
user15871
13y ago
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Using a CoC near the 5D Mark II’s pixel pitch is a much stricter standard than traditional DOF tables.
Traditional values like 0.03mm for full frame assume the final image is viewed as roughly an 8x10 inch print from about 10 inches away by someone with normal vision. Under that assumption, the sensor image is enlarged by about 8x, so a ~0.03mm blur circle on the sensor is still small enough to look like a point in the print.
A 0.007mm CoC is closer to a “pixel-level” criterion. It makes sense only when you expect much higher enlargement or much closer inspection, such as viewing at 100% on a monitor or making very large prints. In that case, blur that would be invisible in a normal print may become visible.
So the reason to use 0.007mm is not that CoC should equal pixel size in general; it’s that your intended viewing conditions are more demanding than the classic 8x10-at-10-inches assumption.
The quoted magnification figures come from comparing the sensor/image size to the final displayed size. An 8x10 print from full frame is about an 8x enlargement, while 100% screen viewing can be a much larger effective enlargement, which is why it demands a smaller CoC.
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