quarter plate
- noun
- Archaic
:
placa de cuarto
- On the first day of June 1848, he made a quarter-plate daguerreotype portrait (one-quarter of a whole plate, or 3 1/4 x 4 1/4 inches) of the mother with her dead daughter.
Examples
-
Eastman responded to such criticism in 1889 by enlarging the circle for its No. 2 camera to a 3-inch diameter, and by simultaneously releasing the No. 3 camera, which produced the familiar quarter-plate-sized rectangular negative.
Academic text (2017) -
The photographer used a quarter plate to capture the stunning landscape in detail.
-
In the early days of photography, many artists preferred the quarter plate format for its manageable size.
-
She carefully placed the quarter plate in the developing solution to reveal her images.
Synonyms
3
6.8
A flat sheet of glass or metal covered with a material that reacts to light to record pictures
Surface Forms
Morphology
The compound is compositionally interpretable—'quarter' suggests a one-fourth size and 'plate' is a flat sheet—so a learner can infer it denotes a plate of reduced size. However, the exact photographic sense (a specific historical plate format and its precise dimensions) is domain-specific and not fully predictable from the parts, making the expression only partially transparent to a B1 learner.
Etymology
Quarter plate comes from early photography. A plate was a thin glass sheet put inside a camera and quarter shows it is about one quarter of a full plate, so the phrase means 'a small photographic plate'.