$1800 full frame dSLR within 18 months?

"Verne Arase" wrote:

Let's face it - reduced DOF isn't always your friend, and both sensor
sizes have both their advantages and disadvantages.

You've not been paying attentiong. Smaller formats have a finer pixel
pitch and thus see the effects of diffraction earlier. That means that
(assuming you want sharp images), you can stop down further with a larger
format. Thus the _maximum_ DOF is the same, regardless of format.

In other words, with FF, reduced DOF is there when you need it, and you take
no hit on maximum DOF.

As for cropping: if you're using an EF lens and your APS-C sensor has
62.5%
the pixels of your FF, yeah you've been cropped. If the pixel count is the
same, you really haven't been - you've just been using the optically
sweetest part of the image :-).

Hehe. You've noticed that there's not a lot of difference in pixel counts
any moreg.

But to get back to the "sweet spot" question...

Except for the problem that the whole of a, say, 35mm lens will probably be
better than the (magnified by 1.6x times) center portion of a 20mm or 24mm
lens. Remember; an 8x12 print requires an 8x magnification from FF and a
13x magnification from a 1.6x camera. So the center portion of the wider
lens has to be (on average) 1.6x better than the whole (on average) of the
longer lens. And wider lenses tend to be worse than longer lenses in the
50mm and under range.

(The sweet spot argument falls completely apart at 85mm and over, where most
lenses perform decently out to the corner.)

The _only_ advantages of smaller formats are the convenience (size and
weight) and price advantages. Which are more than enough to make purchasing
a smaller format camera the right thing. Heck, 35mm essentially killed
medium format back in the post-war period, despite not being able to make a
decent 11x14.

David J. Littleboy

Tokyo, Japan

On Thu, 21 Sep 2006 00:30:35 -0500, Verne Arase
wrote:

On Thu, 14 Sep 2006 15:20:43 -0500, Thomas T. Veldhouse wrote
(in article ):

With an APS-C sensor you get a lot more reach with your telephotos, and if
they can lower noise levels I could see sticking with a smaller sensor and
carrying around less glass.

No, you do not get a lot more reach. You just get cropping for free.

Not with an EF-S lens - which is what I meant about carrying around less
glass.

In one sense, you're right: using an EF-S lens, the image circle isn't
as big, so there's not as much crop of the image circle.
But, in another sense (and in the real one, IMO) you are getting a
crop of the field of view of the stated FL.
IOW, that EF-S 10-22mm lens, at 10mm, is giving you less FOV than
you'd get with a 10-22mm lens at 10mm on a FF camera.
That's a crop.
--
Bill Funk
replace "g" with "a"