  Field of View (FoV) and contrast limitations of stellar interferometers have
been the scope of numerous publications for more than thirty years. Recently,
this topic regained some interest since long-baseline terrestrial
interferometers or space borne nulling interferometers are envisioned for
detecting and characterizing extra-solar planets orbiting in the habitable zone
of their parent star. This goal supposes to achieving sufficient contrast ratio
in the high angular frequency domain, thus on the whole interferometer FoV. In
this paper are reviewed some of the contrast and FoV limiting factors,
including spectral bandwidth, flux mismatches, fringe tracking, telescope image
quality, atmosphere seeing, optical conjugation mismatch of the telescopes
pupils, influence of anamorphous optics, pupil aberrations, signal-to-noise
ratio and deviations with respect to the golden rule of imaging
interferometers. Finally, a tentative classification of all these factors is
provided.
