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[DueyDooDah]

So Mark, and any other full-frame users, can you list advantages and disadvantages that you have found since you've moved to the FF format?

 

[pjacobi]

The Canon white paper explains the advantages of Full-frame sensor and why they will always be much more expensive than crop sensors.

http://www.robgalbraith.com/public_files/Canon_Full-Frame_CMOS_White_Paper.pdf


-Paul

 

[DueyDooDah]

Yes, I understand the technical reasons. I'm looking for advatages/disadvatages from people that actually moved to them. I like hearing the ups and downs of people that have experience.

 

[MarkBarbieri]

So Mark, and any other full-frame users, can you list advantages and disadvantages that you have found since you've moved to the FF format?

Mark as in me? I don't shoot full frame (with the exception of a couple of 5D and D3 shots). My 1D (not a 1Ds) is an APS-H sized sensor. It is sized between "full frame" and APS-C. It's sort of the ******* stepchild of sensor sizes - too big for the little lenses and too small for a full view of the big lenses.

Personally, I dislike the term "full frame." It gives the implication that there is something special about that particular size that makes it "full". That misleads people unfamiliar with the concepts to thinking that there are some special advantages for being that size.

As for the advantages that I've seen using a larger than APS-C sized sensor, they are:

1) At the time I bought my camera, I felt that it had the best image quality per pixel of any <$10,000 DSLR on the market. That was because it had some of the largest pixels in its generation of cameras.

2) A bigger, brighter viewfinder - the bigger the image circle, the more light gathered. The more light gathered, the larger and/or brighter the viewfinder.

That's pretty much it. You lose some on the long end because of the lack of crop factor but you make it up in IQ. Because my sensor size is in no-mans land, I lose on the wide end because I'm cropped compared to the 35mm sized sensors and too big to use the EF-S/DX lenses.

One thing rarely mentioned is that lenses are designed specifically for certain types of sensors. No lens is perfect; they are all designed around trade-offs. When you design for a 35mm film sized sensor, you make different trade-offs than you do if you are designing for a smaller, higher resolving sensor. Some lenses really work better on "ff" cameras and others work better on "cropped" cameras.

That's why I think it's important for camera makers to determine what their future plans are for sensor sizes and sensor resolutions. The two optimally need to be designed with each other in mind.