1/1.7" Type

At 7.44 by 5.58mm, this sensor occupies a specific middle position most photographers never think about directly: meaningfully larger than the tiny 1/2.3-inch sensor found in basic point-and-shoots and budget drones, but still noticeably smaller than the 1-inch sensor used in premium compacts and higher-end drones. It's become the sensor of choice for a specific product category that needs to be genuinely tiny and rugged while still delivering real image-quality improvement over the smallest sensor sizes: premium action cameras like the GoPro HERO12 Black, and mid-tier consumer drones positioned between budget and flagship models, like the DJI Air 3's wide camera.

Why This Exact Size, and Not 1-Inch or 1/2.3-Inch

Action cameras face a constraint few other camera categories share: the sensor and lens assembly has to fit inside a genuinely tiny, ruggedized, often waterproof housing, and the whole camera is frequently mounted somewhere weight and bulk matter enormously — a helmet, a drone, a chest harness. A full 1-inch sensor's larger lens assembly doesn't fit that constraint nearly as well as this smaller size does, while a 1/2.3-inch sensor would give up meaningful image quality and low-light performance a premium-tier action camera needs to differentiate itself from cheaper competitors. This format is, in effect, the size manufacturers landed on as the best available compromise for that specific product category's genuinely unusual set of requirements.

The Crop Factor and What It Does to Field of View

This sensor's crop factor against full frame works out to roughly 4.65x. Action cameras almost universally pair this sensor with a fixed, very wide real focal length lens — typically in the range of a 16-19mm full-frame-equivalent field of view — specifically because the intended use (mounted on a helmet, a bike, a drone) usually calls for capturing as much of the surrounding scene as possible rather than a normal or telephoto perspective, and the resulting distinctive wide-angle look has become a recognizable visual signature of action-camera footage in its own right.

Depth of Field: Effectively Infinite, By Design

This sensor's circle of confusion works out to roughly 0.0062mm under the diagonal/1500 convention — smaller than the 1-inch format's figure, though noticeably larger than the even tinier 1/2.3-inch sensor's. Combined with the fixed, very wide real focal length most cameras on this sensor use, depth of field is effectively total in nearly every real shooting scenario: from a couple of feet to infinity, everything reads as sharp with no meaningful focus decision required, which is exactly the behavior an action camera needs when it's being operated hands-free and unattended during activity rather than manually focused by a photographer composing a shot.

Why Video Specs Matter More Than Stills Specs Here

Cameras built around this sensor size are overwhelmingly marketed and used for video rather than still photography, and their real differentiating specs tend to be frame rate, codec, stabilization and dynamic-range handling in motion rather than anything specific to still-image depth of field or bokeh, which this format's small size and fixed wide lens make largely moot anyway. Understanding this sensor's real dimensions is still useful groundwork for anyone doing still captures from this class of camera, but it's a secondary use case relative to what the format was actually engineered for.

Plug this format into the DoF & Hyperfocal Calculator to confirm just how forgiving its depth of field is at typical action-camera focal lengths, and in the Crop-Factor & Equivalence Converter to translate a stated fixed lens's real focal length into a full-frame-equivalent field of view for comparison against a more conventional camera system.