It stands to reason: one looks at the world and we expect to see objects in focus. Blurry backgrounds and soft focus may be all the craze with the DSLR crowd, but remember such narrowly focused scenes lack clear depth cues and will quickly disorient your viewers. With the advent of 3D, shooters must again embrace cameras and camcorders with smallish sensors; the 2/3-inch imager size appears to be ideal with optimal depth of field and dynamic range. And there’s one other thing: The new Panasonic 3DA1 which I’ve been discussing at length throughout Asia features a relatively modest 1/4-inch chip array (one 3 X MOS chipset for each eye). The camera is notable because the small sensor while offering exceptional depth of field also features remarkable low light performance. How can that be that a tiny 1/4-in sensor can offer such superb low light response  even at a lofty +24dB gain?

The overlaying of the left and right images produces a noise cancellation effect. Our brains effectively cannot see or process the noise under such circumstances and therefore disregards it. The result is very  little visible noise even at extremely low light levels.

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