Olympus model selection cheat-sheet

Craving full-frame? Read this first.

Reading this article might save you some money. No, I’m not sponsored to write this, so you may safely proceed. All you’ll get is technical insight and honest opinion.

Perhaps like many photographers, you’ve thought about going for a full frame camera. Perhaps you’ve heard about shallow depth of field, low light shooting and noise. Maybe you’ve heard that full frame is “one stop faster” or “one stop brighter”.

In this article, I’ll cover one of the reasons for going full frame – more light, and how much sense it makes, especially for your bank balance.

Ever wanted a Nikon D800E? Read on. (Image credit: Jastrow)

By going from APS-C to full frame – probably the most common move – you gain approximately one stop of light, i.e. you get twice as much light over the whole of your sensor. It would be approximately true to say that shooting ISO 200 on full frame, you get the same noise as shooting ISO 80 on APS-C. So you can shoot faster shutter speeds and, over the whole sensor, get the same noise. However, if you shoot 16 megapixels on APS-C, then shooting 36 megapixels full frame, you will get the same PER PIXEL noise, at the same ISO. So far, so good.

Relative size of the two major DSLR sensor formats (Copyright breakfastographer / Chriusha (Хрюша) / CC-BY-SA-3.0)

So if we shoot the same apertures, we gain a stop of light. So we can ask the question, how much does it cost to gain a stop of light?

If you upgrade from an 18-55/3.5-5.6 APS-C kit lens to a 17-50/2.8 APS-C premium zoom, you gain 1-2 stops of light, and it might cost you 150 Eurodollars if you buy used. Or for about the same price, you could upgrade to a 17-70/2.8-4.5, which gives you almost exactly one stop advantage over the kit lens, and a bit of extra range.

If you further upgrade to an 18-35/1.8 zoom, you might pay about 600 Eurodollars used or a good offer new, and you would gain a stop over the 17-50/2.8 or over two stops vs. an 18-55/3.5-5.6 kit lens. But you shorten your range by about one stop of teleconversion. Don’t worry if that sounds technical – just remember that 35mm is 35mm and not 50, 55 or 70mm.

Another possible upgrade path? The Tamron 17-50/2.8 (Image credit: Christian Fischer/CC-BY-SA-3.0 Unported)

If low light shooting, reduced noise or faster shutter speeds are what you’re after, and you’re still shooting with an APS-C camera and kit lens, you owe it to yourself to first invest the 150 to see if the extra light is worth it. This will put you in a much better position to judge whether you want to invest about ten times that amount (or more) to get to a full frame camera and appropriate lens. (Note that a full frame camera with an f/4 lens offers no light advantage over an APS-C camera with an f/2.8 lens!)

There are other points to consider, of course, some of which I’ll touch on briefly. A full frame camera generally offers greater sharpness due to both an increase in resolution and easier manufacture and assembly of appropriate glass. The full frame format is more resistant to diffraction, typically tolerating f/11 rather than f/8 (APS-C) or f/5.6 (Micro Four Thirds) – note that these assumptions only hold for certain pixel pitch, i.e. a 36 megapixel full frame camera is just as sensitive to diffraction at the pixel level as a 16 megapixel APS-C camera. (Other assumptions apply, such as having comparable filter stacks in front of the sensor.) However, over the entire frame, the full frame camera is more tolerant. The flip side is that you need to shoot at those smaller stops to reach the same depth of field, meaning that in landscape shooting, there is no full frame advantage in available light, for the same positioning and framing.

Furthermore, full frame has greater limitations when it comes to designing zoom lenses – you may notice that a common superzoom lens specification for full frame is the 28-300mm lens, whereas on APS-C, the limit has been pushed to 16-300mm – the same versatility in focal length as a 24-450mm on full frame!

Similarly, compare the Sigma 18-35/1.8 to its full frame sibling, the 24-35/2. The smaller lens is both faster and, depending on your point of view, slightly more versatile. (The comparison is hampered by the full frame lens being the equivalent of a 16-24mm on APS-C – not an easy comparison!)

So a full frame camera is best suited to the shooter who knows what situations they want to cover and what their preferred focal lengths are. If you prefer spontaneous shooting and versatility, it is likely that a full frame camera will not make you happy.

Arguments about achieving shallow depth of field more easily on a full frame camera deserve a separate article.

Pentax K-70: what DOESN’T this camera have?

Pentax K-70 in “silky silver” finish.

Ricoh have gone all-out with the introduction of the Pentax K-70, which includes not only weather sealing, a 24 megapixel sensor, 14 bit RAW and new noise suppression, but also pixel-shift resolution. So what distinguishes it from the 24 megapixel, 14 bit, pixel-shift K-3 II?

Pentax K-70 in “silky silver” finish.

The 1/6000s top shutter speed suggests that the K-70 retains the noisier shutter unit from the K-r lineage, and doesn’t have ultrasonic dust removal, which has been consistently reserved for the K-5 and K-3 product lines. The flip-side is that the K-70 should easily achieve the advertised 4.5 stops of stabilisation if the K-3 II can do so with its extra baggage.

If you don’t need GPS and AstroTracer, this camera will be an easy purchase to make for its advertised US $650 price tag.

DPReview forgets Sony RX10 III has stacked CMOS, concludes lens is improved

I’m not even sure I should wait on them to figure out why they got the result they got, it seems they’re quite content with it, as are their commenters. I don’t know what massive electromagnet they engaged in North America, but it’s working. I thought about making popcorn, but figured out I might end up obese before they figure out what’s really going on.

They seem to understand that Pentax’ pixel shift improves resolution, so no idea why they’re having problems now.

Link to article about RX10 III (if you want)

Pentax full-frame with AstroTracer built in

Ricoh just updated its full-frame camera information. Of particular interest is the phrase, “using the camera’s ASTROTRACER function” under one of the new images (from the D-FA 24-70mm lens). I understand this to mean that the camera itself will provide the AstroTracer, so that no O-GPS1 accessory is needed. Note, however, that one reviewer of the K-3 II has commented that the inbuilt AstroTracer function in that camera was not as reliable as using the O-GPS1 on the K-3. Hopefully, Ricoh will have made improvements in this area.

Hasselblad Masters to wait eight months for their prizes

Hasselblad has announced the winners of its Hasselblad Masters 2016 competition, but they’ll have to wait until photokina in September to receive their prizes – a new Hasselblad medium format camera each. Perhaps this means that Hasselblad will announce a new camera at the trade show, which might be worth the wait – after all, we were promised that the time of whimsical management decisions at Hasselblad (Lunar, Stellar, HV) were over.

Timelapse/hyperlapse craze reaches saturation

I just watched Exhale, which was billed as some kind of revelatory experience. Within seconds of the video starting, my mind had drifted off to doing other things without me consciously realising it. I then watched it a second time just to understand how I had become so disconnected. The answer I came to is that the novelty of timelapse footage has faded. Crazy moving clouds, dangling flowerheads, changes from day to night and back – we’ve all seen it before, and in a variety of different landscapes, too, set to the same formulaic music as last time. It’s become hard to keep up the excitement.

Hyperlapse, meanwhile, to me is the pinnacle of making things banal. An entire weeklong trip can now be videographically condensed into just a few short minutes, with zooming replacing the experience of actually travelling from one place to another.

I, for one, am glad to be putting this need to “be amazed” at every new timelapse video that comes out, behind me, and getting on with more important, real stuff.

Yours,

Codger