Originally posted by Okami Is it really that much more expensive to manufacture a FF sensor?
Yes! You need to make a lot more things bigger inside the camera, to make use of the bigger sensor: bigger mirror, bigger viewfinder, bigger mechanics to move that mirror, better dampening then, to reduce the bigger mirror's harder impact... Bigger shutter, too etc. So, it all adds up.
Originally posted by Okami And what if a company decided to throw down the gauntlet and make a FF consumer camera. While that is unlikely it isn't impossible. What I dont understand is what people's obsession over people who want a FF camera? Is it so bad?
If I see, that people debate the current price of the new K20 and wait for a significant drop before buying, I think, this is enough said about the willingness of people to shell out the money for a FF-camera…
Originally posted by Okami If you had a FF 14mp sensor and a cropped 14mp sensor wouldn't it be very likely that the FF one would be better?
At least with current technology a FF sensor with the same pixel count would have noticeably less noise, thus improving its low-light performance and its performance at higher ISO settings. In addition, and that would be my personally most important point, it would show a better expsoure latitude, due du the larger single pixels.
Anyway, there are significant drawbacks to FF sensors too, which somehow tend to get overlooked in many discussions:
FF sensors are much more prone to show severe vignetting, due to image forming rays coming in at an angle (as most lenses are not telecentric). Also, with fast lenses, corner sharpness is affected, as the rear depth of field is very shallow, which (again depending on the lens construction) might lead to the effect, that the image corners are outside the dof.
So, everybody can make his own choice, no sensor format offers the perfect solution. I think, that the APS-C size offers enough potential to improve in terms of noise and exposure latitude and I even guess, that the K20 can be bettered in this respect with improved firmware. After all, a DSLR is much more, than just the sensor…
Ben