how many feet does a 40-150mm zoom?

[stephanie lyn]

im selling my camera and a lady asked me how many feet will my lens zoom? how do i answer that??

Originally Posted by stephanie lyn

im selling my camera and a lady asked me how many feet will my lens zoom? how do i answer that??

Eleventy-billionty.

*nods*

~Eric

[prabbit237]

I use my zoom lens to photograph the moon at times so I guess it'd zoom to 1,261,164,700' with no problem

[theosus]

I've often wondered the same thing. A rifle scope, for example, will at least tell you it makes stuff "X times bigger". Camera lenses are sold in mm focal lengths, but even then it doesn't really tell you anything. Is the 150mm enough to really bring in those two people down the block? Then you have the crop factor on smaller sensor cameras - that 100mm lens on a aps-c size sensors is more like 160mm on a "regular" size Sensor
I would tell her - come see the camera, look through it. If your happy with the zoom, buy it. If she's nowhere near you, as in an eBay sale, tell her what kind you have, and to go to best buy and try out a camera with a similar lens. It will hopefully give her enough to go by when making a decision.

[stephanie lyn]

thank you, i know the question sounded stupid and when she asked i was like what? she just wants a camera to take pictures of her kids on the baseball field...and when i told her the size she just kept asking well how many feet is that, i tried telling her lenses dont come in feet they come in mm and she seemed like she was let down or something. thank you for your response

[prabbit237]

Originally Posted by theosus

I've often wondered the same thing. A rifle scope, for example, will at least tell you it makes stuff "X times bigger". Camera lenses are sold in mm focal lengths, but even then it doesn't really tell you anything. Is the 150mm enough to really bring in those two people down the block?

A camera CAN'T tell you "makes stuff look X times bigger" because with a camera, it depends on how it's displayed. If I have a camera and a 600mm lens but then display the picture on a cell phone, it may look smaller than the camera with a 18mm lens displayed at full resolution on a 25" screen (to lazy to do the math to tell exactly if the same subject at the same distance would actually look smaller or not.) Same for printing the pictures. That's why lens are measured in focal length where 100mm will make something look 2x as large as 50mm under the SAME circumstances but it can't say "will make it look 2x larger than life" like binoculars or a rifle scope can.

The rifle scope is comparing one known "display" (your naked eye) to another known "display" (your eye looking through the scope) so it can easily make that claim.

But basically, a 40-150mm lens can enlarge something to 150:40 times larger or a 3.75x variation in size.

[Biomech]

Divide the longest focal length by the shortest, that will give you the joe public measurement. So your lens would be a 3.75x
(oop just seen prabbits post :P Same thing he said)