But this only works if you don't shoot in video mode on these cameras, like shooting RAW stills for time lapse. If you shoot video mode, the whole sensor is used for the HD frame, minus whatever trimming it takes to get 16x9 out of a 3x2 sensor. That area is then decimated -- line skipping, pixel binning, compression, color subsampling, etc. - to get the HD recording.
You don't have the option of only using a smaller area of the 5D sensor to get 1080P video unless you are shooting in still mode, like for time-lapse.
Which comes to conclusion, that full sensor (5616 pix wide) gives more information for both .RAW and compressed .MOV images comparing to 7D's 5184 pix. I don't mention the height of the sensors, that is being cropped for .MOV, not forgetting, that full sensor is almost twice bigger then 1.6, thus has about 60-70% bigger pixels to produce less noise.
Matching SENSORS in Canon 7D vs. 5D ??
in D-SLR
Posted · Edited by Sergey Pylypenko
Which comes to conclusion, that full sensor (5616 pix wide) gives more information for both .RAW and compressed .MOV images comparing to 7D's 5184 pix. I don't mention the height of the sensors, that is being cropped for .MOV, not forgetting, that full sensor is almost twice bigger then 1.6, thus has about 60-70% bigger pixels to produce less noise.